Decision, Deliberation, and Democratic Ethos

Abstract

According with the trend in democratic theory currently in vogue, in order to defend democracy it is necessary to give it rational foundations. Indeed, many theorists following this approach believe that it is by providing such foundations that allegiance to liberal democratic institutions will be secured. To criticize rationalism is, according to such a view, to undermine the very basis of democratic citizenship. Hence their rejection of the so-called critique which is presented as a threat to the democratic project. In this essay I will take a very different position. I will argue that it is only by drawing all the implications of the critique of essentialism -which in my view constitutes the more important insight of what is often referred to as the post-modem approachthat it is possible to grasp the nature of the political and acknowledge the challenge to which the democratic project is today confronted. I submit that the universalist and rationalist framework in which that project was formulated during the Enlightenment has today become as obstacle to an adequate understanding of the present stage of democratic politics. Such a framework should be discarded and this can be done without having to abandon the political aspect of the Enlightenment that is represented by the democratic revolution. On this point I propose to follow the lead of Hans Blumenberg who in his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age' distinguishes two different logics in the Enlightenment, one of selfassertion (we could call it political), and one of self-grounding (we could call it epistemological).' According to him, these two logics have been articulated historically but there is no necessary relation between them and they can perfectly be separated. It is therefore possible to discriminate between was is truly modern-the idea of self-assertion-and what is merely what he calls a of a medieval position, i.e., an attempt to give a modem answer to a premodern question. In Blumenberg's view, rationalism is not something essential to the idea of self-assertion but a residue from the absolutist medieval problematic. This illusion of providing itself with its own foundations which accompanied the labor of liberation from theology should now be abandoned and modern reason should acknowledge its limits. Indeed, it is only when it comes to terms with pluralism and accepts the impossibility of total control and final harmony that modem reason frees itself from its premoden heritage. This approach also reveals the inadequacy of the term postmodernity when it is used to refer to a completely different historical period that would signify a break with modernity. When we realize that rationalism, far from being of modem reason, was in fact a reoccupation of a premodern position, it becomes clear that to put rationalism into question does not imply a rejection of modernity but a coming to terms with the potentialities that were inscribed in it since the beginning. It also help us to understand why the critique of the epistemological aspect of the Enlightenment does not jeopardize its political aspect of self-assertion but, on the contrary, can help to strengthen the democratic project. Anti-Essentialism and Politics In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy we attempted to draw the consequences of the critique of essentialism for a radical conception of democracy by articulating some of its insights with the Gramscian conception of hegemony. This led us to put the question of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character at the center of our approach. One of the main theses of the book is that social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. This means that any social objectivity is ultimately political and that it has to show the traces of exclusion that governs its constitution; what following Derrida, we have called its constitutive outside. The idea is that if an object has inscribed in its very being something other than itself; if as a result, everything is constructed as difference, its being cannot be conceived as pure presence or objectivity. …