Organized by Professor Jane Mansbridge
Is an integration of deliberative democracy and pluralism possible? Although several theorists have written on the need to integrate disagreements on moral questions with deliberative theory (e.g., Thompson, Chambers, Besson), conflicts in material interest are almost universally believed to lie outside the deliberative frame. The large corpus of deliberative democratic thought considers bargaining and negotiation over conflicting material interests orthogonal to or antithetical in spirit to deliberation, even though in practice, many legislative and international interactions mix together a search for the common good and self-interested bargaining. Voting itself has been construed as antithetical to deliberation (Arendt).
Can we develop deliberative norms for bargaining, negotiation, compromise and voting? Or should we think of one or more of these processes as antithetical to deliberation? Participants in this workshop have written provocatively about the right relation between the search for the common good and the (temporary) settlement of questions of conflicting interests through various mechanisms, including mechanisms like voting that involve the use of coercive power (the threat of sanction or the use of force). Each has written about the institutions appropriate for achieving one or more of these goals.
No one, perhaps, has developed an unshakeable position on the issues, although it may turn out that classic deliberative (Habermas, Rawls, Cohen, Marti) and republican (Pettit) views coherently oppose neo-pluralist (Mansbridge) or agonistic views. An approach foregrounding respect for others (Thompson) may make most sense of both. This workshop was intended to provide a flexible deliberative forum in which to discuss these issues in depth.