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As testified by the increasing success of the extreme right in several countries, western societies are witnessing a growing disaffection with democratic institutions. Such a disaffection may have serious consequences for the future of democracy. Unfortunately, liberal democratic societies are ill-prepared to confront the present challenge, since they are unable to grasp its nature. One of the main reasons for this inability lies in the type of political theory currently in vogue, dominated as it is by an individualistic, universalistic, and rationalistic framework. Such a framework erases the dimension of the political and impedes envisaging in an adequate manner the nature of a pluralistic democratic public sphere.
This paper examines the most recent paradigm of liberal democratic theory: "deliberative democracy," in order to bring to the fore its shortcomings. Then, I put forward some elements for the elaboration of an alternative model that I propose to call "agonistic pluralism."
To be sure, the aim of the theorists who advocate the different versions of "deliberative democracy" is commendable. Against the interest-based conception of democracy, inspired by economics and skeptical about the virtues of political participation, they want to introduce questions of morality and justice into politics, They are looking for new meanings of traditional democratic notions like autonomy, popular sovereignty, and equality. Their aim is to reformulate the classical idea of the public sphere, giving it a central place in the democratic project. However, by proposing to view reason and rational argumentation, instead of interest and aggregation of preferences as the central issue of politics, they simply move from an economic model to a moral one. Their move consists in replacing the market-inspired view of the public sphere by another conception that conceives political questions as being of a moral nature and therefore susceptible of being decided rationally. This means that they identify the democratic public sphere with the discursive redemption of normative validity claims. It is clear that what is missing, albeit in different ways, in both approaches is the dimension of the political. This is why I consider that the deliberative model is unable to offer a better understanding of the nature of democratic politics and that it cannot provide a real alternative to the aggregative view.
Deliberative Democracy
There are many different versions...