Regulating Disagreement, Constituting Participants: A Critique of Proceduralist Theories of Democracy

Abstract

In his keynote address at the 1995 Ontario Society for the Study ofArgumentation conference, Frans van Eemeren contended that ‘[a]rgu-mentative discussion is the main tool for managing democratic processes’and therefore, ‘argumentation should be valued as the elixir of life of par-ticipatory democracy’ (1995, p. 145). Because we agree that argumenta-tion is the lifeblood of democratic governance, we believe that it is crucialto explicate the relationship between argumentation and democracy. Thisrelationship is complex, and the lack of a single account of argumentativeactivity or a unitary conception of democracy makes its analysis difficult.Joseph Wenzel (1990) identifies three distinct perspectives from whichto theorize argumentation: –a logical perspective focuses on relevancy, sufficiency, and acceptabilityof the arguments made by individuals to justify their convictions;–a rhetorical perspective focuses on the process by which argumentativediscourse simultaneously appeals to and creates the communal identi-ties and norms that serve as the bases for persuasion (cf. Greene, 1997);and –a dialectical perspective finds in communicative interaction the resourcesfor developing a set of principled procedures for resolving differencesof opinion.Correlatively, we propose, Jurgen Habermas (1994, 1996a) identifies threenormative conceptions of democracy:–a liberal conception understands the role of government as mediatingbetween the conflicting private interests of individuals;–a republican conception understands the purpose of politics as thearticulation of a common good embodied in the ethical life of a com-munity; and–a procedural conception claims democratic legitimacy cannot be guar-anteed by either the administrative capacities of the state/ market orthe virtues of ethical communities, but instead is grounded in the very