dem deliberation within
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Democratic Deliberation Within
I. A Conceptual Prelude
The phrase 'deliberative democracy' rotates revealingly on itsaxis. Expressible
alternatively as 'deliberative democracy' or as'democratic deliberation', each
formulation reveals importantly differentfeatures of that ideal.
Consider 'deliberative democracy'. There, 'deliberative' modifies what
sort of democracyit is we want. To say that democratic decision-making ought
be'deliberative' implies, first of all, that it be 'de-liberated':constrained, rather
than altogether at liberty toresolve the issues in just any old way.1Unconstrained
democracy might proceed in any manner that happens to takethe majority's
fancy. The constraints of deliberative democracy oblige it to proceed by 'the
consideration and discussion of thereasons for and against a measure'.2
Deliberative democracy is obliged to respectthe twin constraints of fact and logic;
it is obliged by precepts of sound judgment 'toconsider carefully' the issues at
hand.Deliberative democracy, secondly, is deliberate: 'studied; not hasty
orrash'. To deliberate is, among other things, 'to take time forconsideration'; and
'deliberate' decisions are 'leisurely, slow, nothurried'. Deliberation itself is
likewise defined by an 'absence of hurry' or 'leisureliness'. Thus it is a slow
andsteady process, the opposite of a 'rush to judgment'.
1Sayeth Hobbes,Leviathan , ch. 6: '... it is called deliberation; because it isa putting an end to the
liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our appetite, or aversion'.2On the secondOxford English Dictionary definition of 'deliberation'. All subsequent quotations,
unless otherwiseattributed, come from the OED definitions of 'deliberate' (v), 'deliberate'(a)or 'deliberation'.
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equally important point, implicit within that other. To saythat we want to
deliberate democratically is to say that we want todeliberate collectively— to come
to some determination that will be recognized asauthoritative among all
deliberators taken as a whole. 'Deliberation', asnoted above, is a process that can
all occur within a single person's head.'Democratic deliberation', in contrast,
seems necessarily to have an interpersonalcomponent to it.
II. Two Aspects of Deliberation
That last observation points to the twofundamentally different aspects of
deliberation which arecentral to my concerns here. On the one hand,
deliberation has an'internal-reflective' aspect. Insofar as deliberation is a matter
of'weighing and judging reasons for and against any given course of action',all
that can take place within the head of a single individual.
On the other hand, deliberation has an 'external-collective' aspect. Thesort
of give-and-take involved in 'weighing reasons for and against'
makesdeliberation an essentially argumentative, and hence discursive,notion.Even where it proceeds entirely within a single person's head, such an
internaldiscourse is inevitably modelled upon, and in that way parasitic upon,
aperson's experiences of interpersonal discussions and debates with oneanother.6
That makes deliberation a fundamentally interpersonalnotion, at root.
It is that external-collective aspect of deliberation which advocatesof
democratic deliberation ordinarily want to bolster. They want theupshots of
deliberation to be regarded as authoritative by parties to the deliberation and to
6Hence thesecond Oxford English Dictionary definition of 'deliberation' as 'theconsideration and
discussion of the reasons for and against a measureby a number of councillors' (my emphasis).See in this connection Aristotle's remarks on'deliberative speaking' addressed to assembliesin book 1, chapters 3-4 of Rhetoric.
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form the basis of (at least partially) 'collectiveintentions' thereafter.7 For
deliberative democrats those outputs are authoritative only because,and only so
far as, they have emerged through external-collective processesof democratic
deliberation, involving a free and equal interchange amongeveryone who will be
affected by them.8
That ideal seems eminently feasible in small-scale societies whereface-to-
face interactions are the norm.9 In large-scale mass societies, they are not and
cannot be. Dahl offers this calculation, by way of a reductio adabsurdum: 'if an
association were to make one decision a day, allow tenhours a day for
discussion, and permit each member just ten minutes — rather extreme
assumptions ... — then the association could nothave more than sixty
members'.10 Thus, the challenge facing deliberative democrats is to find some
way ofadapting their deliberative ideals to any remotely large-scale
society,where it is simply infeasible to arrange face-to-face discussions acrossthe
entire community.11
7
Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy & Disagreement, pp 4-5. HenryRichardson, 'Democraticintentions', Deliberative Democracy , ed.Bohman and Rehg, pp. 349-82.8See, e.g.: Bernard Manin, 'On legitimacy and politicaldeliberation', Political Theory, 15 (1987),
338-68; Joshua Cohen, 'Deliberation and democratic legitimacy',esp. pp. 21-3 and 'Procedureand substance in deliberative democracy', Democracy & Difference , ed. Seyla Benhabib(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996),pp. 95-119 at pp. 99-100.
9Classically explicated in Peter Laslett, 'The face to face society', Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed.Peter Laslett, 1st series. Oxford:Blackwell, 1956), pp. 157-84.
10Robert A. Dahl, Afterthe Revolution? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 67-8concludes fromthat that the ideal of everyone having 'a full and equal opportunitytoparticipate in all decisions and in all the processes of influence,persuasion and discussionthat bear on every decision... can exist only among a very small number of people',with'several dozen' marking 'the limits of physical possibility'.
11In the famous phrases of James Madison: 'In a democracy the people meetand exercise
government in person; in a republic they administer it bytheir representatives and agents. Ademocracy consequently, must beconfined to a small spot. A republic maybe extended overa large region' (The Federalist , no. 14).
Even where everyone can meetface-to-face, assemblies cease being deliberative whenthey become toolarge, with speech-making replacing conversation and rhetorical appealsreplacing reasoned arguments. As Madison (or perhaps itwas Hamilton) writes, 'In all verynumerous assemblies, of whatevercharacters composed, passions never fail to wrest thesceptre from reason.Had every Athenian assembly been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly
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Various responses have been offered, all of which seem to suffer
certaindefects. Having surveyed those, I offer another. My proposal is to
easethe burdens of deliberative democracy in mass society by shifting much
ofthe work of deliberation from the'external-collective' back into the 'internal-
reflective', back inside thehead of each individual. In defence of my proposal, I
recall that suchinternal mental processes play a very major role even in ordinary
conversational settings. It is a small step from there to suggest thatempathetic
imagining can substantially substitute for interpersonalconversation in the sorts
of deliberations which democrats desire acrossmass societies. On that view, the
challenge confronting deliberative democrats in mass society lies less in
makingeveryone else 'conversationally present' than in making them
'imaginatively present' in the minds of deliberators.12
This alternative model has the further effectof prioritizing what might
otherwise seem peripheral to modern democratic theory. Nodoubt democrats
always regard it as a presumptively good thing todemocratize all corners of
society, the arts along with everything else.But seeing empathetic imaginings as
central to the deliberative processes of mass democracies sensitizes ustoconditions surrounding the production and distribution of crucial aids tothose
imaginings, conspicuously among them the literary, visual andperforming arts.
Ensuring the broad representativeness of those representations is, on the model
of democraticdeliberation I am propounding, of capital importance.
would still have been a mob' (TheFederalist , no. 55). Cf. Cicero, De Officiis, II.48 and Madison,The Federalist , nos. 62, 63.
Among those who see size as the mainchallenge to deliberative democracy are: RobertA. Dahl and Edward R.Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press,1973); Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: BasicBooks), chs. 19-20;
James S. Fishkin, The Voice of thePeople: Public Opinion and Democracy (New Haven, Conn.:Yale UniversityPress, 1995), ch. 2; Benjamin I. Page,Who Deliberates? Mass Media in ModernDemocracy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 1.
12After the fashion of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). Onimagining in general, seeGilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), ch.8.
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several times over the course of their lives16; andfurther suppose that no two
jurors ever serve together more thanonce.17 Then each individual would be
deliberating with one group on oneoccasion, and another on another. Through
several iterations of thisprocess of pooling one's wisdom, first with one group
and then with thenext, we could come to some 'common' view (about the content
of the 'common law', or whatever) across the community as awhole.18 Let us
therefore call this a model of 'serial' or 'disjointeddeliberation'.
A variation on that model appeals to certain sorts of post-modernists. The
problem, asthey see it, is an increasingly fractured social world. One solution,
theysometimes suggest, might be a 'directly-deliberative polyarchy' involving'a
plurality of modes of association'.19
The trick, of course, lies in how all those separately deliberating
bodies'judgments can be articulated with one with another. There are many
ways,not all of them particularly democratic. The deliberations of localEnglish
assizes, for example, were made into a unified common law across the realm by
the same smallset of judges (twenty five in all) travelling up and down the
16As originally they did, when the same handful of local notables assembledin periodic English
assizes. What matters of course is the ratio ofpotential jurors to the number of trials forwhich they are needed: anincrease in the number of potential jurors can be counterbalanced
by an increase the number of trials (which isalso happening, of course, in our increasinglylitigious societies).
17As was clearlynot the case in the original English assizes, where the same local notablesmettogether time and again, never crossing county boundaries.
18For a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let us say that each person poolshis opinions with (N-1)i
other people, where N is the sizeof the deliberating unit and i is the number of differentgroups with which each person deliberates.Supposing each of us deliberated with a group of
11 others on our every tenth birthday, from the ages of 20 to 70, then our opinion wouldhavethereby been pooled (directly or indirectly) with those of116 or 1,771,561 other people.19 Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, 'Directly-deliberativepolyarchy', European Law Journal 3 (#4:
Dec 1997): 313-42. See similarly: Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers etal., Associations andDemocracy , ed. E. O. Wright (London: Verso,1995); Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy (Oxford:Polity, 1994); Seyla Benhabib, 'Deliberative rationality andmodels of democratic legitimacy',p. 35; and Iris Marion Young,'Communication and the other: beyond deliberativedemocracy', Intersecting Voices (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 60-74.
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does seem genuinely to hold thepromise of being both deliberatively and directly
democratic.
That is what I take to be the bestconceivable model of 'disjointed
deliberation'. But even that model of'disjointed deliberation' depends crucially
upon certain presuppositions which are likely not to be met in thereal world.
Specifically, it presupposes that everyone is a member of some(indeed, several)
groups, each of which approximates the deliberativeideal. In the real world,
altogethertoo many people are socially excluded (participating in no
properlydeliberative groups within the community) or socially
segregated(participating in only the same sets of deliberative groups). Insofar
aseither is the case, there will to that extent beno 'serial deliberation' including,
however indirectly, all the members ofthe community. The weakness of those
presuppositions marks the limits ofthe model of disjointed, serial deliberation in
the real world.
B. Substitution: Ersatz Deliberation
'Disjointed deliberation' substitutes deliberationwithin partial, overlapping
groups for deliberation across the entirecommunity. Models of 'ersatz
deliberation', in contrast, substitutedeliberation within a subset of the community
for deliberation across the whole of the community.
How the subset is identified and how the substitution isjustified are
interconnected issues. The subset is supposed to berepresentative — typical, 'a
In a stylized calculation akin to thatperformed for juries above, if each ofus were a
member of just five groups containing twenty others each, andnone of us overlapped anyother more than once, then on these assumptionsour judgment would be merged (directly orindirectly) with 205or 3,200,000 others.
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fair sample', 'a microcosm'26 — of the larger group. Substituting its judgment for
that of the larger isjustified, in turn, on the grounds that the considered views
reachedthrough deliberation within that smaller group will be representative
(anaccurate reflection) of the views that would have been reached had similar
processes been feasible within thelarger group.27
The clearest example of this sort of 'ersatz deliberation' —the substitution
of deliberation within a smaller group for that within anunwieldily large one —
is of course representativedemocracy.28 Legislatures are continually styled as
'deliberative assemblies', incontrast to 'popular' ones (and even within the
legislature, the lessnumerous house is standardly styled the 'deliberative'
chamber29). But recent innovations like 'citizens'juries' and 'deliberative polling'
are other instances of the same broadclass of model.30
In the realm of high theory, models structurally similar to these
standbehind the 'thought experiments' of Rawls and Habermas. In both
thoseauthors' earlier writings, anyway, the issue is not what any actual
peopleactually decide. Rather, the issueis what propositions would
26 John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), ch. 5; inRichard Wollheim,
John Stuart Mill, Three Essays (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1975) , pp. 142-423 at p. 228. In LordBoothby's blunter formulation, 'Ideally,the House of Commons should be a social microcosmof the nation. The nation includes a great many people who arerather stupid, and so shouldthe house'; quoted in A. H. Birch, 'Thenature and functions of representation', The Study of Politics: ACollection of Inaugural Lectures, ed. Preston King (London: Frank Cass, 1977), pp.265-78 at p. 268.
27Thus, for example, in their deliberations behind the closed doors of thePhiladelphiaConvention the Founding Fathers self-consciously couched theirarguments in terms of what'ought to occur to a people deliberating on a Government for themselves, ... in a temperatemoment,and with the experience of other nations before them'; James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New York: Norton, 1966; originally published 1840),entry for 26 June1787, pp. 193-4.
28Hanna F.Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1967).Bernard Manin, Principles of RepresentativeGovernment (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997), esp. ch. 6.
29Madison, TheFederalist, nos. 62, 63.30 James S.Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for DemocraticReform (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991) and The Voiceof the People. Anna Coote and Jo Lenaghan,Citizens' Juries: Theory into Practice(London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1997).
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hypothetically command universal assent inspecific choice situations, idealized
in certain respects. The early Rawlsand Habermas would have us substitute the
hypothetical deliberations of individuals in those idealized choicesituations for
the actual outcomes of actual political processes, flawed asthey are by ignorance,
self-interest and so on.31
All these models of ersatz deliberation involve, at root, substitutinga
subset for the whole and letting the subset deliberate on behalf of thewhole. The
generic problem with all of those schemes lies in ensuring thecontinuing
representativeness of the subset, once the deliberation gets underway. Ofcourse
people change their minds in the course of the deliberation (itwould hardly be a
genuine deliberation at all if they did not, from time totime32). The question is
whether people who started out being representative ofthe wider community, in
all the ways we can measure, are alsorepresentative of that wider community in
the ways in which they change over the course of the deliberation.
On the face of it, that seems unlikely. From everyday life we knowthat
different conversations with different participants (or the sameparticipants
interjecting at different points) proceed in radicallydifferent directions.33
Given
31 John Rawls, A Theory ofJustice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
JürgenHabermas, The Theory of Communicative Action , trans. Thomas McCarthy(Boston:Beacon Press, 1984).Later iterations of these theories, both from the principals andtheirfollowers, succeed in making the deliberations more 'real' but in ways thatrun into otherof the problems here discussed. How this happens inHabermas' Between Facts and Normshave been discussed already; and similar difficulties arise with theproblem-centred approachsuggested by William Rehg, 'Intractable conflictsand moral objectivity: a dialogical, problem-
based approach', Inquiry , 42 (#2, June 1999), 229-58. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York:Columbia University Press, 1993) purports to make thederivation of principles of justice
'political, not metaphysical': but thediscussions are still imaginary, not real (the issue is whatreasonablepeople could assent to, not what they do); and even that imaginary deliberation is'blinkered' (in terms that willbe introduced below) insofar as certain positions are ruled outof courtas being 'unreasonable'. See similarly T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe toEach Other(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
32Elster, Deliberative Democracy , esp. pp. 8-9.33Thetheoretical importance of which, in other connections, is teased out byJames Tully, 'The
agonic freedom of citizens', Economy & Society , 28(#2: May 1999), 101-22.
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of 'mediated deliberation' occurs through the agency of the mass media. In the
'democracy ofsoundbites', there are very strict limits on how much information
anyonecan impart to (or impose upon) everyone else.
There are obvious problems, however, with all such strategies
forfacilitating mass deliberation by 'restricting inputs' into them. Unlesswe have
some reason for supposing we are screening out only inputs whichare irrelevant
or superfluous41 ,restricting inputs leaves us deliberating more-or-less in
ignorance. Ourcognitive capacities, which rely upon informational inputs, are
more-or-lessundernourished. (Hence the term, 'emaciated deliberation'.) In
thelimiting case of a 'democracy of soundbites', we are deliberating on thebasis of
so little as to make it hardly acase of deliberation — of seriously reflective
'weighing and judgingreasons' — at all.
D. Selective Uptake: Blinkered Deliberation
The most famous deliberative democrat of the modernera, perhaps, is Jürgen
Habermas. Much recent work in this area borrowsand builds on his notions of 'civil society' and the 'publicsphere'.42 This is not theplace to elaborate his larger
theories. For the narrower purposespresently at hand, let us focus upon what
exactly is supposed to happen inthe 'public sphere'.
Ideally, of course, we are supposed to 'engage' with one another. Insome
of the early institutions out of which the modern public sphere grew— such as
41As arguably we do in the legislative case.42Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger andFrederick Lawrence (Oxford: Polity, 1989;originally published 1962), esp. pp. 31-43; 'Thepublic sphere' (trans. S.and F. Lennox), New German Critique, 3 (1964), 49-55; andBetweenFacts and Norms , esp. chs 7-8. Note the way these themes have been taken up in,e.g.,John Rawls, 'The idea of public reason revisited', University ofChicago Law Review, 94(1997): 765-807, and Charles Taylor, 'Modernityand the rise of the public sphere', TannerLectures on Human Values , 14 (1993), 203-60.
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the coffee-houses of eighteenth century London, forexample — people may well
have done just that. (They engaged directly, but oncontemporaneous accounts
not particularly deeply.43) Most of the institutions of thecontemporary public
sphere, however, are much more nearly like Habermas'other great paragon of
the early public sphere, the broadsheet newspaper.
'When Addison and Steele published the first issue of the Tattlerin 1709',
Habermas says, 'the coffee-houses were already so numerous andthe circles of
their frequenters already so wide, that contact among thesethousandfold circles
couldonly be maintained through a journal'.44 Participants in the public sphere
were no longer all engaging directlywith one another. Their engagements were
mediated through the broadsheet,in ways I have already described and with the
problems I have alreadysketched.
Here, however, I want to draw attention to yetanother problem, which is
just this: Contributors to broadsheets —as, indeed, those holding forth in coffee-
houses — are not so much 'talking to one another' as they are 'posting notices for
all to read'. Others might (or might not) take note of them, and reply. Butinsofar
as they reply in similarly public fashions, they too areessentially just postingother notices for all to note (or not), in turn.
43Consider the descriptions in William Hazlitt's essay 'On coffee-housepoliticians', Table Talk, or
Original Essays (New York: ChelseaHouse, 1983; originally published 1869), pp. 261-83.Coffee-house politicians,Hazlitt says, 'are like an oyster at the ebb of the tide, gaping forfreshtidings' (p. 263). Among them, 'The Evening Paper is impatiently expected andcalled forat a certain critical minute: the news of the morning becomesstale and vapid by the dinner-hour. .... It is strange that people shouldtake so much interest at one timewhat they so soonforget: — the truth is, they feel no interest init at any time, but it does for something to talk about. Their ideas are served up to them, like their billof fare, for the day' (p. 262). In coffee-houses, furthermore, 'People donot seem to talk for the sake of expressing their opinions, but
to maintainan opinion for the sake of talking. .... It is not conversation, but rehearsing apart' (pp. 268-9).Finally, the coffee-house politician 'goes around for a meaning, and thesensewaits for him. Men of education and men of the world order thismatter better. They knowwhat they have to say on a subject, and come to the point at once. Your coffee-housepolitician balances between what he heard last and what he shall say next;and notseeing his way clearly, puts you off with circumstantial phrases,and tries to gain time forfearof making a false step' (p. 269).
44Habermas, Structural Transformation , p. 42.
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IV. Deliberation Within
All of those previous proposals for makingdeliberation work in the context of
mass society focus on the'external-collective' side of deliberation. They all
suppose that the key to makingdemocracy deliberative is making everyone
'communicatively present', insome sense or another. But in any large society, it is
impossible to dothat literally, and it seems unsatisfactory to do that through any
of the various other devices that have beensuggested so far. My proposal is to go
back to the beginning, to see if wecannot make the 'internal-reflective' aspect of
deliberation do more of thework for us.
Let us begin by recalling how very much of what goes on in a genuine
face-to-face conversationis actually contained inside the head of each of the
participants, anyway.Even if there is a good argument to show that language is
essentiallyshared rather than private, stillit is the case that most of the work in
interpreting the utterances ofothers — decoding the literal meaning, and
enriching that literalmeaning pragmatically in light of contextual information —
is donewithin the hearer's own head.Thus, for example, when trying to understand what others are saying, we
start by assuming thatthey are trying to talk sense and, at least as a first
approximation, weassume that they mean by their utterances roughly what we
ourselves wouldhave meant by them.47 We are prepared to treat provisionally as
true, for the purposes of anygiven conversation, that set of propositions which
47 J. L. Austin, 'Other minds', Philosophical Papers , ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 3rd edn
(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1979), pp. 76-116 at p. 115. Donald Davidson, InquiriesintoTruth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
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bondage — served the abolitionistcause.59 But some such 'expanding of people's
sensibilities' occurs in all goodwriting.60 Literary theorists regard it as something
of a commonplace that'historical and social events as mirrored in the plots of
Stendhal, Dickensor Tolstoy had a realness, anauthenticity deeper than that
conveyed by the journalist or professionalhistorian. .... The art of Balzac is a
summa mundi , an inventory ofcontemporaneous life. A man can learn half a
dozen professions by readingZola'.61
It is not just that fiction (and art more generally) might, and often
does,contain allusions to social, economic, political and historical facts, andin
that way might serve certain didactic purposes. The larger point isthat those
lessons come packed with more emotional punch andengage our imagination
more effectively than do historical narratives orreflective essays of a less stylized
sort. 'Artists', John Dewey says,'have always been the real purveyors of news,
for it is not the outwardhappening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of
emotion, perception and appreciation. ....Democracy', he continues, 'will have its
consummation when free socialinquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full
and movingcommunication'.62
That is not just to say that novelists are more evocative writers
thanhistorians or essayists (true though that may be, too). Rather, they fixtheir
focus on the particular — one person or one action or oneperiod — and they
59Kimberly K. Smith,'Storytelling, sympathy and moral judgment in American abolitionism', The
Journal of Political Philosophy , 6 (1998), 356-77.60This, and the political implications flowing from it, form recurringthemes in the writings of
Martha Nussbaum. Cf. Love's Knowledge:Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York :Oxford University Press,1990); Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston:BeaconPress, 1995); and Cultivating Humanity: A ClassicalDefense of Reform in Liberal Education(Cambridge, Mass : HarvardUniversity Press, 1997).
61George Steiner, 'Liberature and post-history' (1965), Language andSilence (London: Faber &Faber, 1967), pp. 413-24 at p. 420.
62 John Dewey, The Publicand Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1954; originallypublished1927), ch. 5, p. 184.
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introduce generalities as anecdotes, episodes viewed from thatparticular one's
perspective.63 That vivid evocation of the particular, in turn, has
importantconsequences for the uptake of works of art. Inevitably, we find
itrelatively easy to project ourselves imaginatively into the place of somespecific
(fictitious but grounded) other. It is necessarily harder to project
ourselvesimaginatively into the inevitably underdescribed sorts of amorphous
sets ofabstract others which are the stock in trade of historians and
socialscientists.64
That fiction 'takes us out of ourselves' in this way is intrinsicrather than
incidental to the enterprise:
The very form of the novel arises from and embraces conflictsof character,values , interests, circumstances and classes. And the formthat only seemsto work well, as Sartre pointed out in his What isLiterature? , when theauthor has at least an implicit commitment to freedom and canempathizewith and portray plausibly social diversity. Where, he asked, isthere agreat totalitarian novel? That was not just a contradiction interms but apsychological impossibility.65
Thus, as George Steiner suggests,
To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulnerableour identity,our self-possession .... [W]hen we take in hand a major workof fiction orphilosophy, of imagination or doctrine, ... [i]t may come to possess us socompletely thatwe go, for a spell, in fear of ourselves...66
63Aristotle, Poetics ,1459a17-1459b8.64Conduct theexperiment for yourself. Is it not ever so much easier to imagineyourself Jean
Valjean, given what all Hugo has told us about him, than it is to imagine yourself a generic'prisonerof the Bastille' on the basis of what historians have told us about thatplace and itsdenizens? Intellectually, generalizations may be easier,both to convey and to grasp; butemotionally and imaginatively, it is easier to evoke more full-describedparticulars thangeneralities which abstract from the detail that makethose particulars more easily imagined.
65Bernard Crick, Essays on Politics and Literature(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989),p. 17.
66Steiner,'Humane literacy' (1963), Language and Silence , pp. 21-9 at p. 29.
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That rhetoric may seem overblown, but the less prosaic truth which
isnonetheless telling is simply this: the 'unique value of fiction' lies inits
relatively cost-free offer of trial runs.... In a month of reading, Ican try out more
"lives" than I cantest in a lifetime'.67
Poets from Wordsworth to Eliot have harboured similar ambitions,hoping
to produce work that 'enlarges our consciousness or refines oursensibility'.68
Some such role has been played, from time to time, by social realist art,by
photojournalism and by radio plays. Nowadays it is played most commonlyby
what one critic dubs 'the imagination of the new media of directknowledge and
graphic reproduction': film, video and television.69
My proposal is simply that we make use of those familiar phenomena
forpurposes of constructing a model of deliberative democracy that isgenuinely
feasible in large-scale societies. Instead of the (inevitably futile) attempt to make
everyone else'communicatively present' in the same place at the same time, let
usinstead try harder to make everyone else 'imaginatively present' in theminds
of each of the deliberators. It might just be possible, through the exercise of a
suitably informed imagination, foreach of us to conduct a suitably wide-rangingdebate among all thesecontending perspectives largely within our own heads.
67Wayne C. Booth, TheCompany We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia
Press, 1988), p. 485.68T. S. Eliot, 'The social function of poetry', On Poetry and Poets (London:Faber & Faber, 1958;
originally published 1943), pp. 15-25. Elaborating onthat thought, Eliot writes that poetryconveys 'some fresh understanding ofthe familiar, or the expression of something we have
experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness orrefines oursensibility' (p. 18); 'The genuine poet ... discovers newvariations of sensibility which can beappropriated by others. .... Inexpressing what other people feel he is also changing thefeeling by making it more conscious; he is making people moreaware of what they feelalready, and therefore teaching them somethingabout themselves' (p. 20). See similarlyWilliam Wordsworth, 'Observationsprefixed to "Lyrical Ballads"' (1820), What Is Art? ed.Alexander Sesokske (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1965), pp. 261-74.
69Steiner, 'Literature andpost-history', p. 420.
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My suggestion, then, is that private fictions can serve public functions.
Perhaps they cannot do so nearly as well as genuineone-on-one conversational
exchanges could have done (though it pays toremember how much of the work
of an ordinary one-on-one conversation isdone within each of the interlocutors'
heads, anyway). But where society is not small enough to make
genuineconversational exchanges among all the relevant public
feasible,substituting internal debates for external ones might not be a badsecond-
best. Certainly it seems at least as promising as all the other second-best
solutions offered by other deliberativedemocrats for overcoming the constraints
of large-scale society, as I shallnow go on to show.
V. Drawbacks of Internal Deliberation
Counting on 'internal-reflective' deliberation alone has some obviousdrawbacks.
One is the obvious absence of an insistent 'other' who ispressing her perspective
upon you.70 Some people and their perspectives might be ignored altogether;
othersmight end up being more-or-less parodied because the too-patrepresentations of them we have inside our heads pass unchallenged.People
whose situations are prototypical and familiar may be representedtolerably well
in our internal deliberations; those whose situations arepeculiar in some way
often will not.71 And so on.
70As Alan Ryan writes, 'In the absence of a real, physically presentinterlocutor who can interrupt,
question, rebut, shrug his or hershoulders, change the subject and at a pinch walk awayentirely, you thereader are at the mercy of my ideas about what this conversation is about....[Y]ou cannot redirect the conversation as youwould wish'; 'In a conversational idiom', SocialResearch , 65 (Fall1998), 473-89 at p. 473.
71Michael F. Schober, 'Conversational evidence forrethinking meaning', Social Research , 65 (Fall1998), 511-34. Seyla Benhabib, 'The generalized and theconcrete other: the Kohlberg-Gilligancontroversy and moral theory', Situating the Self (Oxford: Polity, 1992), pp. 148-77. Note thatit is not just the'peculiar' that presents a challenge, though: any departure from our ownway
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All of that is true enough. That is why external-collectivedeliberation is
superior to purely internal-reflective deliberation, wheresociety is sufficiently
small to make external-collective deliberationgenuinely possible. But all
thatseems much less of a worry where societies are of a size such thatgenuinely
collective deliberation is not possible anyway. When comparingthe second-best
solutions pressed upon us by the necessity of coping withlarge numbers, the
internal-reflective mode of deliberation might be at least as good as any external
mode that isthere actually available to us.
A. Attending to the Other
In substituting internal-reflective deliberation for external-collective,the first set
of worries concerns who willbe 'included' in the deliberation. In external-
collective deliberations,deliberative democrats are at pains to ensure that
everyone affected isparty to the deliberations; and they try to design the
deliberative processwith a view to ensuring that.72 With internal-reflective
deliberations, however, each deliberatorinevitably populates her own imaginaryinternal universe as she will.
Of course we might exhort her to be as inclusive as she can, to tryvery
hard to engage imaginatively with as many different sorts of people as might
genuinely be affected by the decision. Wemight even send her a pile of books or
photos or videos, as an aid to thatprocess. But there seems little that we can do
from the outside to make the full range of others present to her mind's eye, in the
of thinking requires a stretch of the imagination which is, to some greater or lesser extent,difficult to achieve.
72See, e.g., John S. Dryzek, 'Political inclusion and thedynamics of democratization', AmericanPolitical Science Review, 90(1996), 475-87.
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way we mighthope to make all appropriate others physically present inexternal-
collective deliberations of the more ordinary sort.
Remember, however, the context of my present argument. I
havesuggested we turn to internal-reflective deliberation precisely because (or,
rather, insofar as) the group ofpeople affected is too large literally to make them
all physically presentand still have a meaningful deliberation. Thus, what we
should becomparing is, on the one hand, the representativeness of the
population which we would conjure up in our mind'seye with, on the other
hand, the (effective) representativeness of thesecond-best methods of external-
collective deliberation surveyed above.
No doubt our imagination will always be imperfect, and some peoplewill
be left out of deliberations based on internal-reflective processesalone.73 By the
same token, however, those other second-best methods ofexternal-collective
deliberation are imperfect too; and some people orpositions will always
unrepresented or inadequately represented in them aswell. I see no way of
settling a priori which mechanism will make the worst omissions. But it
isnonetheless worth noting that they both run analogous risks in thisrespect.Note too that, even where others are physically present in external-
collectivedeliberations, that does not necessarily mean that we will be
genuinelyresponsive to them and their concerns. We can always turn shrug
ourshoulders, turn our backs or walk away.74 We canalways turn a blind eye or
deaf ear.75 Input is no assurance of uptake. Indeed, recalling how heavily
73
On the other hand, external-collective deliberations necessarily omit fromconsideration peoplewho cannot be present (future generations, in theexample which I elaborate in Section VI),whereas even non-existent(possible or probable future) people can be imaginatively presentin internal-reflective deliberations.
74Ryan, 'In a conversational idiom', p. 473.75As Averill Harriman famously did, ostentatiouslyswitching off his hearing aid when his Soviet
counterparts launched intoone of their standard harangues. (I owe this anecdote to my oldfriend andteacher, Robert Ferrell.)
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ordinaryconversation depends on internal representations, one might even say
that'internal presence' is just as much a precondition of effective representation
in external-collective deliberations as it is ininternal-reflective ones.
B. Understanding the Other
In real conversations between real people, there is a constantcross-checking and
renegotiation of meanings.76 That facilitates the understandings which real
interlocutors have of oneanother. People who are merely overhearing a
conversation sometimes findit hard to understand what is going on, precisely
because they cannotinterject into the conversation to cross-check their own
understandings of what others mean to besaying.77
Whereas in real conversations a code of dyadically-shared meanings
emerges,that simply cannot happen in imaginary conversations with imagined
peopleof the sort that occur in the 'internal-reflective' deliberative mode.There,
we are essentially havinga conversation with ourselves. If we are sufficiently
imaginative, wemight envisage our 'imaginary other' correcting us in ways akinto those inwhich actual others might. But inevitably that is a pale shadow ofthe
vigorous sort of cross-checking and cross-fertilization which occurs inany actual
conversation. No single individual's imagination, however rich,will be able to
76'Conversation' can be defined 'as continuously negotiated communication';see Charles Tilly,
'Contentious conversation', Social Research , 65(Fall 1998), 491-510 at p. 495.77As Sartre says, if we were to hear agramophone of an everydayconversation of a household inProvins, we would not be able to understandit, lacking the background and context; Jean-Paul Sartre, What IsLiterature? , trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1950; originallypublished1948), p. 50. Formal experimental evidence in support of this speculationisprovided by Michael F. Schober and Herbert H. Clark, 'Understanding byaddressees andoverhearers', Cognitive Psychology , 21 (1989), 211-32; for a brief gloss, seeSchober,'Conversational evidence for rethinking meaning', pp. 520-2.
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mimic what occurs in the perfectly ordinary course ofevents in conversations
among real people with genuinely different perspectives.
Before we become too worried by that, though, let us reflect upon thefact
that much the same is true of mass deliberations as well. In dyadicconversations,
each speaker can sensitize the other to her own particular perspective one-on-
one. In mass deliberations, however, whattypically happens is that some speak
and many listen. Hopefully those whospeak are broadly typical of many others
who do not.78 But in any moderately large group there can be no realistic hope
of eachperson individually negotiating meanings with each particular
other,anyway.
Thus, while 'internal-reflective' deliberations may look seriouslydeficient
in the sorts of shared understandings they nurture when comparedwith
conversational dynamics in dyads or small groups, once again that is not the
relevantcomparison. The proposal here is to let internal-reflective
deliberationssubstitute for external-collective ones in large groups. In settlings
likethat, discursive dynamics are very different from conversational dyads
anyway. There, the sorts ofintensely negotiated meanings which we findemerging in conversationaldyads will be largely missing. There, external
representations risk beingjust as stylized, just as oriented toward the
prototypical, as are the representations which figure in people'sinternal
imaginary reconstructions of social life.79
78If only in theiratypicality: in a representative sample, the fact of diversity ought berepresented
even if not all the diverse components can be individuallyrepresented.79They inevitably reflect the 'generalized' more than the 'concrete' other,in all the other's concrete
forms, in the terms of Benhabib, 'Thegeneralized and the concrete other'.
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C. Representing the Other
As if in direct reply to my proposal to replace external deliberation withinternal,
talking with reading, Montaigne protests:
Studying books has a languid feeble motion, whereasconversationprovides teaching and exercise all at once. If I am sparringwith a strongand solid opponent he will attack me on the flanks, stick hislance in meright and left; his ideas send mine soaring. Rivalry, competitiveness andglory willdrive me and raise me above my own level.80
Certainly we can sympathize with that sentiment. Playing chess
againstyourself is far less satisfactory than playing against someone else (oreven
a good computer): when playing against yourself, you always know whatthe
'other' is thinking; and that makes everything too pat, too devoid of surprise and
of the creativity thatcomes from it. All that seems as true of cooperative games
like conversation as it is of competitive games like chess. Furthermore,
toparaphrase Mill, no one can know someone else's interests, position
andperspective nearly so well as that person herself. For both those
reasons,there is therefore a compelling case, pragmatic as well as symbolic, for
the 'politics of presence': for alldifferent sorts of people to be physically present
during deliberationsthat affect their interests, rather than just having their
interests'represented' by others.81
Once again, however, that ideal seems to be compromised by therealities
of large-scale societies. The circumstances here in view — the circumstances
80Michel deMontaigne, 'On the art of conversation', The Essays of Michel de Montaigne , trans & ed.
M. A. Screech(Harmondsworth, Mddx.: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1991; originallypublished1580), Bk 3, essay 8, pp. 1044-69 at p. 1045.
81Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence: Democracy & GroupRepresentation (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1995).
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The upshot would seem to be, once again, that in any large-scale
societyexternal-collective deliberations are necessarily very far from ideal.That
deliberation cannot effectively give every distinct voice a hearing:second-best
short-cuts of one sortofanother will inevitably be required; and something will
inevitably be lostin the process. It is once again an open question how much
would be lostthere, compared to how much would be lost by trying instead to
replicatesome such conversation wholly within one's own mind in an internal-
reflective deliberation. But once again,at least we can say that the clear
advantage that external-collectivedeliberation enjoys over internal-reflective
deliberation in the ideal caseis clearly eroded, in the case actually at hand.86
D. Finding Time for the Other
Finally it might be argued that, in any large-scale mass society,internal-reflective
deliberative processes would fall prey to the samepressures on time and
attention as do external-collective deliberativeprocesses. In the latter case, the
problem is that we lack the time to have the requisite conversations withallothers. In the former case, it might be said, there is a perfectlyparallel
problem: we lack the time to imagine those conversations,either.
Certainly it is true that 'attention' is a strictly limited resource,imposing
severe constraints on our deliberative capacities. Herbert Simonreports:
The human eye and ear are highly parallel devices, capable of extractingmany pieces of information simultaneously from the
environment and decodingthem into their significant features. Before this
86True, in situations of great heterogeneity we might find it hard to imagineourselves in a very
different other person's position: but thatcompromises our capacity for understanding whatthe other is claiming, inexternal-collective deliberations, just as much as it compromises ourcapacity for imagining ourselves her forinternal-reflective deliberative purposes.
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information can be usedby the deliberative mind, however, it mustproceed through the bottleneck of attention — a serial,not parallel, processwhoseinformation capacity is exceedingly small. Psychologists usuallycall thisbottleneck short-term memory, and measurements show reliablythat it canhold only about six chunks (that is to say, six familiar itemsofinformation). .... The narrowness of the span of attention accounts for a
great deal of human unreason thatconsiders only one facet of a multi-faceted matter before a decision isreached.87
Those limits on human cognitive capacities, however, impose no extra
constraints on internal-reflective deliberative processes as compared to external-
collective ones. Inexternal-collective deliberations, just as surely as in internal-
reflectiveones, we must find time to attend to all the persons and perspectives
thatare present. Indeed, we have to find more time for them, there: themechanism by which we attend to others throughexternal-reflective processes is
oral or written communications, whichmeans that we can attend to only one of
the others at a time; and thatmakes the external-collective deliberative process a
more radically serial process than isinternal-reflective deliberation. Even if we
can only effectivelymulti-track six different things at once in our internal
reflections, wecan nonetheless 'listen' to five more people/perspectivesat once
through that internal-reflective process than we can through theexternal-
collective one.
Finally, suppose we manage successfully to 'internalize' theperspectives of
various others, through having imaginatively projectedourselves into their
position on some previous occasion. Then perhaps we might even be able to'see'
the situation from those many different perspectives at once withoutany
conscious effort. If those other perspectives have been internalizedin some
strong way, applying them is 'second nature' to us. No deliberate act of will is
87Herbert A. Simon, 'Human nature in politics: the dialogue of psychologyand political science',
American Political Science Review , 79 (1985),293-304 at p 302.
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On theother side are equally familiar questions about 'for whom does
onewrite?'89 Who is the audience, the reference group?Who are the subjects, and
how are they represented?90
Thisis not the place to launch into those familiar debates in literary
theory.I merely hope to have shown that, far from being arcane disputes
withinliterary and cultural studies, those are actually issues which areabsolutely
central to deliberative democracy as it is inevitably practiced in modern large-
scale societies. There,representations inside the head count for at least as much
asrepresentation in any legislative chamber. And the art forms out of whichwe
construct those representations are potentially as potent, politically, as are the
elections out of which weconstruct legislative assemblies.
It is not a novel thought that democracy requires well-stocked
publiclibraries and public funding of the arts.91 It is not a novel thought that
'artistic creations shape politicalconceptions', or that public museums should be
'forums, nottemples'.92 All of those familiar debates obviously bear on the topic I
am heretrying to get onto the table of the democratic theorist. But for the
mostpart they bear only obliquely.Thus, it is true and important that art is in part a public good, andit would
be undersupplied in consequence by ordinary market forces; weought subsidize
89Sartre, What Is Literature? ch. 3.90In terms of democratizing culture (or, rather, of enlisting culturalartefacts in the service of
democracy), it is not so much a matter of 'highculture' against 'low' as it is of 'broad' against'narrow'.
91
Amy Gutmann,Democratic Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), ch. 8.Dick Netzer,The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978). Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse: The VisualArts and the Public Interest (New York:Basic Books, 1984). Carnegie Commission on theFuture of PublicBroadcasting, A Public Trust (New York: Bantam, 1979).
92Murray Edelman, >From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political
Conceptions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Robert McC.Adams, 'Forums, nottemples', American Behavioral Scientist , 42 (#6:Mar 1999), 968-76.
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creativity, insofar as we can.93 And, to shift from the production to the
consumption side, it is true andimportant that we ought 'take art to the people',
rather than locking itaway in the Ivory Tower. All of that is crucial in generating
anddisseminating the sorts of representations which will serve as crucial aids to
the sorts of internal-reflectivedemocratic deliberations that I am here proposing.
Equally importantly, though, we need to ensure the representativeness
ofthose representations. What in effect we will be doing, in shiftingdemocratic
deliberation from the external-collective to theinternal-reflective modes, is
enfranchising images.In so doing, we obviously need to ensure that the images
thus enfranchisedare as extensive as required really to represent the diversity
ofexperiences extant across the communities to be affected by
thosedeliberations.94
Not all of those experiences are pretty. Not all are intellectuallyedifying
or morally uplifting. Some will be sad or depressing or downrightobnoxious.
Still, all deserve a voice in the democratic cultural space,insofar as that feeds into
internal-reflective deliberation — or anyway all do, to just the same extentthat
they deserve a literal voice in the democratic political space that issupposed tofeed into external-collective deliberations. Insofar as we have good democratic
grounds for censoring 'hate speech', we might beprepared to ban its other
cultural manifestations as well.95 But from the present perspective, we have no
93Ronald Dworkin, 'Can a liberal state supportart?', A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard UniversityPress, 1985), pp. 221-33.94Issues of 'neutrality' emerge in state funding of the arts, insofar as notall projects can be funded.
Strictly analogous issues arise inconsultative fora, insofar as not all interested parties can begiven aseat at the table. The solution, in both cases, is to ensure that the subset which isfunded/seated is genuinelyrepresentative of the larger set from which it is drawn — toensure that all distinctive perspectives are adequately represented.Cf. Harry Brighouse,'Neutrality, publicity and public funding of thearts', Philosophy & Public Affairs , 24 (1995), 36-63 and Dworkin,'Can a liberal state support art?'
95For examples see Karl Lowenstein, 'Legislative Control of PoliticalExtremism in EuropeanDemocracies', Columbia Law Review, 38 (1938):591-622 and 725-74.
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more grounds for confiningour public concern, and public subsidies, purely to
more 'elevated' formsof cultural expression than we do for confining our political
attentionpurely to the expression of 'elevated' opinion.
One final advantage of internal-reflective deliberations is that,precisely
because they do not require people to speak for themselves, they might hope to
secure better representationof the communicatively inept or the
communicatively inert thanexternal-collective deliberations ever could.
Consider as a limiting casefuture generations.96 Our actions and choices today
clearly affect them, and according toordinary democratic canons everyone
affected ought have a say in ourdeliberations. But the unborn, by nature, cannot
speak for themselves; andothers who purport to speak for them will inevitably
be asked bywhat authority they do so. Internal-reflective deliberations
experience nosuch problems. They do not need future people to be physically
present inorder for them to be imaginatively present; and the whole process
proceedsby everyone imagining themselves into the place of others, no special
warrant is required for each of usto imagine ourselves into the place of people in
the future.97
At some point, collective action — and hence some collectivedecision — is
going to be required. For that, we must merge all the products of all our private
internal-reflective deliberationsinto some common collective determination,
somehow. In that sense,internal-reflective deliberations are thus not a subtitute
for but ratheran input into external-collective ones. My point is merely that the
96Peter Laslett and James S. Fishkin, eds, Justice BetweenGenerations. Philosophy, Politics & Society,6th series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Other examples of communicativelyinert interestswhich we arguably ought take into account might includeinterests of other species, people indistant countries and so on; RobertE. Goodin, 'Enfranchising the earth, and its alternatives',Political Studies , 44 (Dec. 1996), 835-49.
97I am grateful for helpful comments and criticisms from Louise Antony,Martin Davies, JohnDryzek, Jim Fishkin, Dick Flathman, Martha Nussbaum andPhilip Pettit.
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more democratically deliberative our internalreflections are, the less worry there
needs be about the impossibility ofour external collective decision procedures
being particularlydemocratically deliberative in large-scale mass societies.
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