Democratic Style: An RSVP

Abstract

When ing a Professor group of Engels us met s at compelling NCA in San question Antonio of last what year might to begin constitute discusa ing Professor Engels s compelling questi n of what might constit te a democratic style, I did what any task-oriented, overcommitted conventioneer would do. I answered the question. I made up a model. I mean, I had lists. I even lugged dog-eared copies of some of my favorite books in my convention totebag to take to the panel, just in case. More specifically, I drew upon some of my favorite democratic theorists to propose a three-pronged normative framework featuring the most basic characteristics I thought such a rhetorical style should exhibit. Because I think it is important to acknowledge the trade-offs between normative and empirically based accounts of democracy, I registered my conscious choice to put the theory first, even though some thinkers, including Robert Hariman, might warn against it.1 Most obviously, democratic style should be reason-giving, I said. Even if the nature and limits of various procedural forums for this reason-giving can be debated, the public articulation of reasons promotes education, legitimation, and accountability, three democratic goals to be sure.2 Second, democratic style should offer to its audience members. Here I use the term recognition in the self-consciously modernist sense influentially described by Charles Taylor, in which a sense of universal citizen dignity is understood as a moral imperative, in the traditions of Rousseau and Herder.3 Last, democratic style should overtly attend to relationships, with emphasis on the imagined more than the real. Even if democratic community can ultimately only be viewed as imagined community, vis-a-vis Benedict Anderson, this imagining itself must be called into being by a rhetoric that activates certain relational commitments to other people whom one does not know.4 Specifically, the commitments I have in mind might be part of an a priori sense of a particular subject position, akin to Deweyan intersubjectivity, to promote a notion of justice through a Rawlsian veil of ignorance and/or emotional capabilities including compassion and trust.5