Arguing with authority: Democratic legitimacy and the public use of history

The dissertation rethinks familiar conceptions of how democratic deliberation promotes democratic legitimacy, making two interrelated claims about deliberation. The first is that in order for deliberation to advance democratic self-government, deliberation must be grounded in the actual commitments of the governed, rather than proffering reasons that people rationally should or reasonably could accept. The second is that historical exemplars---historical events and persons considered to be models of what should or should not be done in contemporary political life---play an essential and underappreciated role in democratic deliberation.;The dissertation begins with a critical reconstruction of the ideal of popular sovereignty. It argues that collective decisions are only legitimate insofar as they embody the actual wills of the governed. Deliberation has a unique capacity to incorporate individuals' disparate wills in collective decisions, but its ability to do this depends on the existence of shared grounds of political argument on the basis of which all individuals can justify their claims and opinions. The dissertation draws on the philosophy of language to complicate the idea of shared commitments, using the tools of inferential semantics to theorize how justifications of collective decisions can ground decisions in the actual commitments, the actual wills, of the governed. Deliberative theorists tend to prioritize abstract principles and values as grounds of argument, but abstract principles and values will not provide a genuinely shared ground of argument in a pluralistic society because the content of these commitments will differ for different people. Commitments to historical exemplars, by contrast, can be integrated into different worldviews while retaining a common semantic content, due to the authoritative structure of these commitments and the common basis of interpretation provided by historical evidence. Historical exemplars thus have a distinctive ability to serve as shared grounds of argument in pluralistic societies. The dissertation concludes by examining the dangers of hegemony that inhere in the appeal to historical exemplars and the importance of shared platforms of argument providing terms in which all individuals can express and defend their claims.