Narrative Deliberation? On Storytelling as a Necessary Component of Public Deliberation

Marcos Engelken-Jorge

doi:10.5209/rev_poso.2016.v53.n1.48460

Abstract

This paper deals with the place of narrative, that is, storytelling, in public deliberation. A distinction is made between weak and strong conceptions of narrative. According to the weak one, storytelling is but one rhetorical device among others with which social actors produce and convey meaning. In contrast, the strong conception holds that narrative is necessary to communicate, and argue, about topics such as the human experience of time, collective identities and the moral and ethical validity of values. The upshot of this idea is that storytelling should be a necessary component of any ideal of public deliberation. Contrary to recent work by deliberative theorists, who tend to adopt the weak conception of narrative, the author argues for embracing the strong one. The main contention of this article is that stories not only have a legitimate place in deliberation, but are even necessary to formulate certain arguments in the fi rst place; for instance, arguments drawing on historical experience. This claim, namely that narrative is constitutive of certain arguments, in the sense that, without it, said reasons cannot be articulated, is illustrated by deliberative theory’s own narrative underpinnings. Finally, certain possible objections against the strong conception of narrative are dispelled.

Highlights

Deliberative democracy gained currency in the 1980s and 1990s as a normative theory intended to consolidate existing liberal democracies
I have distinguished between a weak concept of narrative, according to which narratives are just another rhetorical device among many that can be used to convey meaning, and a strong conception, which sees narratives as an unavoidable feature of human communication, playing a fundamental role in the shaping of the symbolic and social world in which social actors live
Whilst the weak conception of narrative – the one that has usually been discussed by deliberative theorists –seems to be compatible with the theory of deliberative democracy, the strong conception, favoured by many social theorists and “postmodern” philosophers, has been interpreted as challenging some of the tenets of the epistemic justification of deliberative democracy

Summary

Introduction

Deliberative democracy gained currency in the 1980s and 1990s as a normative theory intended to consolidate existing liberal democracies. While the exact contours of this epistemic conception differ depending on the author, the main idea, common to most of them, is that any consistent defence of deliberative democracy has to account among other things for why democracy ought to be deliberative (Lafont, 2006) It should be so, according to this argument, because deliberation is a decisionmaking procedure which is more likely to yield “substantively correct outcomes (i.e., just, efficient, good, etc.)” (Lafont, 2006: 7) than other democratic decision-making procedures. Deliberation, contributes to the development of political preferences that tend to accommodate the interests and values of other citizens, are more likely to be based on collectively accepted arguments and forms of reasoning, and tend to rest on a greater pool of factual information These three aspects are supposed to grant deliberation an epistemic edge over other democratic decision-making procedures, which in turn grounds the claim that democracy should be deliberative. As we shall see there are two meanings of narrative in the scholarly literature: one of them can be reconciled with this epistemic edge of deliberation; the other one, has been interpreted as posing a greater challenge.

The Weak Conception of Narrative

Meeting the Objection of Ethnocentrism

Conclusion and Future Research