Habermas' Theory Of Deliberative Democracy

Since 1990s Western scholars began to focus their attention on deliberative democracy. There emerged a great many theories and researchers, such as Joseph Bessette, Bernard Manin, Joshua Cohen, Maeve Cooke, Carolyn Hendriks and James Bohman, etc. The western political philosophy was greeted by the "Deliberative turn". The "deliberative democracy theory of rational proceduralism" by Habermas, who was recognized as the master of deliberative democratic theory, is the representative theory of the "deliberative turn" in contemporary western political theory.The related researches at home and abroad showed that the emergence of deliberative democratic theory was not an accident, but a conscious theoretical response to the crises of contemporary western social democratic theory and practice. For Habermas, the contemporary society is multiple and complex, whose social integration problem cannot be solved by establishing cultural, moral, religious or other spirit norms. A complex society can achieve its social integration only by integrating its system. The political system is the primary way to achieve the system integration, which let people rationally choose the way to unite in society and form the social solidarity of institution by putting social integration into the contract behavior of each free-will voluntary. Therefore, the primary way of integration of contemporary society can only be the democratic way that respects the right of free choice.Looking from the current situation of contemporary western society, the pluralist democracy theory is the preference democratic paradigm of the modern complex society. Abandoning normative requirement starting from empiricism, pluralism democracy theory regards the political power and administrative power as the manifestation social power, which combines liberal norms with facts and transforms the legitimacy problem of the politics into the guiding control problems of the administrative power to the whole society. Hence the political state will be no longer the "democratic state", but become the "administrative state". Thus, the abandonment of normative requirements and more attention to politics makes it impossible for pluralist democracy theory to resolve the political legitimacy problems and to provide public policy of enormous consensus so as to effectively control the society. Therefore, pluralist democracy theory will inevitably face dual pressures of the "legitimacy deficiency" and "guiding control deficiency". The contemporary democracy theories are faced with severe challenges.The first response to this challenge is economic democracy theory with liberal theory as its background. According to Habermas' analysis, the economic democracy theory "concerns mainly the legalization process on the premise of individualism of methodology", which interprets democratic process as the individual activity of rational choice for selfish consideration, in which individual preference were aggregated to be unified social preference through voting in elections and party competition. Based on the hypothesis of the "rational man" and that "individual preferences can be measured", the model describing democratic process can be accurately established. However, "reasonable voters paradox" and "Arrow's Impossibility Theorem" shattered the dream of economics democracy theory, and relapsed into the "paradox of norm effectiveness" while encountering "legitimacy dilemma".Different from the economics democratic theory, social control theory with the systematology as its background puts emphasis on the output terminal of political power cycle. It emphasizes the technocracy and regards the democratic process as the guiding control activities of the autonomously created and generated political system over the society and requires the experts familiar with the social control technology to implement responsibilities maintaining the rationality of system management by means of their specialized knowledge of system operation. Habermas believed that the technocracy of systematology put the political guide and control in the comprehension of the inherent logic of political system operation, cut off the internal relations between communicative power and political power and eliminated the significance of democratic norms which resulted in falling into the "validity paradox of fact", and meanwhile magnified the problem of "guide-control deficiency"The dilemma of contemporary western democracy suggested the imperative for paradigm transformation. In response to this challenge, Habermas' deliberative democracy theory emerged as the time required, to resolve the double dilemma of the contemporary democracy theory in the west.Habermas established the foundation of his deliberative democracy theory in a wide range of practical philosophy context. According to the changes of the thinking mode of philosophy in the post-metaphysical era, Habermas, by deconstructing the philosophical paradigm of consciousness and the critique of subjective model, found the existence of communicative reason based on inter-subjectivity, which is to provide social norms with legitimacy and universality for complex society integration, and form a foundation for rational operation and interactive communication.The communicative action under the domination of communicative reason rises in the language use process. Habermas'universal pragmatics intended to explore communicative skills and ability, and justify a kind of theory of communicative competence. According to this theory, the mature communicative subjects inevitably have the reflective ability to deal with their own actions in term of validity claims of speech act. All communicative actions in subjects' communication must meet the four validity claims of comprehensibility, truth, rightness, and truthfulness. Then communication can enter into the "ideal speech situation". "The ideal speech situation" is the "perfect discussion of conditional planning" and the "free and public communication conditions", which determines that nobody has the privilege of monopoly on truth, and that only by equal and rational communication can truth consensus be achieved. Habermas holds that the communication for truth consensus must return to and establish direct contact with the real life world so as to bring about practical value and significance. He regards life world as a mutual understanding background, field of vision, and communicative domain of discourse. Only in the life world, and through dialogue and debate can we associate with the objective world, the social world and the subjective world at the same time and integrate the reasonable validity claim. In short, the life world provides cognitive truth, social solidarity, and the source of self-identity.On the basis of communicative action theory, Habermas further expanded ethical implications of communication, developed discourse ethics and examined the rules and paradigm for communication from moral dimension to establish the moral foundation for rational lifestyles. The "D" principle (discourse principle) proposed by discourse ethics and the "U" principle (generalized principles) would neither involve substantial contents in the conversation nor presuppose any special theory (such as justice principle, basic human rights, religious commandment, etc.) as the premise of dialogue but provide a ideal communication platform, which let those with different opinions conduct their argument rationally and persuade others with better arguments and reasons to bring cohesion of consensus. Fundamentally, the task of Habermas'discourse ethics is quite consistent with interactive action theory and universal pragmatics, and is also the universal condition to rebuild understanding and rational communication.Communication theory lays the foundation of the philosophy paradigm for deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy theory is nothing more than an inevitable result of the rational radiation from communication theory to practical domain. In communicative horizon, communicative reason, deliberative principles and communicative power become the bridge-building essentials when communication theory and its derivative theory (discourse ethics) interpret the problems of deliberative democracy. Communicative reason replaced practical reason and took an essential and fundamental position in practical philosophy. Communicative reason specifically indicated the "the action condition of'self'and'other'", in which involves ethic communication of discourse and the matrix of politics and law deliberation. On the premise of clarifying "the boundary between the legitimization of general behavior and special moral norm" in post-secular era, the D principles of discourse ethics was re-expressed as the "deliberative principles" of deliberative democracy. Deliberative principles applied to law field combined with the form of law to form the democratic principles, which would guarantee the citizens'full freedom in communication and carry out rational deliberations on related political issues. The rational deliberations successively employ practical deliberation, ethic-political deliberation, moral deliberation and legal deliberation, and finally form a reasonable political will and "legitimate law" through the institutionalized legislation system. Then, deliberative democracy introduces communicative power into its theory to restrain the administrative power and to ensure the political power in practice be subject to deliberative principles. The legislative power and administrative power of the state are based on public opinions, values, and individual interests, so only by communicative power and deliberative process can legislative activities be legal.After implementing the investigation of the path from the deliberative democracy ideal to democracy practice, Habermas first analyzed two popular democratic models in modern west---liberal democracy and republicanism democracy---and pointed out that liberalism based on a kind of dim consciousness emphasizes the restriction of power and the protection of basic rights of the public citizen, which possesses the core of modern rule of law; the republicanism based on a good will, stresses the public will and the value of public life, stimulates citizens' enthusiasm for political participation, and restrains politician by deliberation and negotiation, which masters the essence of modern politics of democracy. However, if people's sovereignty is ignored, the law will lack its legitimacy; if human right is ignored, the law will lose its basic connotation. Deliberative democracy combined the advantages of the two models together and rebuilt the possible confidence in the practice of political reason with human rights and the people's sovereignty, modern freedom and ancient freedom, private autonomy and public autonomy on the basis of mutual understanding of deliberation.On the basis of constitutional democratic institution of liberalism and the principle of equal participation of multiple views of republicanism, Habermas designed "two-track deliberative politics". This design separates the formal decision-making mechanism from the informal discussion mechanism. The formal political mechanism refers to constitutional democracy with elections and the parliament as the center, the informal discussion mechanism relies on the positive factors of civil (citizen) society, public realm of politics, etc. in life world. Previous scholars of deliberative democracy mostly focused on the formal deliberative democracy mechanism, while Habermas paid more attention to the informal discussion mechanism. But generally speaking, Habermas insisted that the two mechanism should be treated equally. He called the informal discussion mechanism "the context of discovery", and the formal deliberative mechanism "the context of justification", the former is mainly responsible for discovering various opinions with wide influence and providing the latter with the opinions while the latter is mainly responsible for deliberating the former and making policies or law according to the former. The two mechanisms supplemented each other, which strengthened the validity operation in the procedure of deliberative democracy.What should be especially concerned about is that the two-track deliberation political model is not on the basis of macro subject (such as a political body of "people"), but on the basis of the operation of mutual deliberation and communication. The "people" of the people's sovereignty, can only be the legal institutionalization which integrates the public will rationally into the communication of the public will.The normative requirements of deliberative democracy must be applied to the democratic practice in the complex society and confirmed by the democracy experience. Habermas' research of civil society and public sphere is to resolve the external tension between normative requirements of deliberative politics and the factuality of social background, and provide a sociology mode for deliberative politics and lay a realistic foundation for Deliberative Democracy. Habermas interpreted the public sphere as a communicative structures rooted in the world of life through the structures of civil society, whose function is to be aware of social problems, form influential public opinion, influence senator or officials with legal rights in political system, and then enter into formal deliberate mechanism through high quality communication ability affects and even determine the public policy making. In other words, the communication power was transformed into administrative power through the public sphere to achieve the legitimacy of law.Civil society is reconstituted by Habermas as the organization and mechanism of non-state and non-economic relationship formed unconventionally. Civil society has not only four kinds of basic rights—freedom of assembly and association, of press, broadcasting and television and the freedom or the privacy of citizen's participation in politics or individuals'negative liberty, personal integrity, independent dignity and protecting the integrity of the life field under the constitutional protection, but also has three "deliberative configuration":communities, groups and movements. Civil society roots in the communicative cycle in the life world experiences, selects and concentrates the issues of common sense in the private sphere and introduces to the public sphere through its "deliberative configuration", and then submits the issues of public opinions to the political system for responses, thus starts the deliberative mechanism completing the ascending process of deliberative democracy from public opinion and public will to law of legitimacy. This is Habermas'sociology mode of deliberative democracy theory.According to the sociology model of deliberative democracy, the public sphere of politics and the communicative structure in civil society must resist the external pressure from the power of politics and society, hold its fundamental standpoint of rational expression and resistance, and maintain its own vitality and autonomy under the protection of the constitution and the support of rational life world. In this way, public sphere could be activated, and mobilized public sphere could inevitably continue its profound influence on the political system, and thus, a democratic society with rational critique and communicative function will be more likely to become a reality. Habermas gave an example of how the mass media resists the power to deal with this problem exhaustively and finally concluded that the complex, diverse and high-risk modern society was in need of deliberative democracy, which will initiate a new envision and understanding, extend the border of democracy, and provid a new and promising direction for the development of democracy theory.After the overall reconstruction and explanation, this dissertation conducted a critical reflection on Habermas' deliberative democracy theory in order to make an overall evaluation of his thought.Firstly, Habermas' deliberative democracy theory is a transcendence of liberal democracy and republican democracy, and is essentially a social democratic type of constitutional democracy. The main contributions of Habermas are of two aspects. One is that communicative reason is used by him to replace the presupposition of controversy over the evil or good of human-nature, and to restore the status of public reason in social governance as a foundation for establishing and perfecting the good society. The other is that the two-track deliberative democracy is used to combine with direct democracy and indirect democracy, and to solve the long-term existing conflict and confrontation between the two, and expand the right of participating in political decision-making into the public citizens.Secondly, Habermas constructed a program of procedural reason with characteristics of metaphysics thinking, providing a unique analytical perspective for exploring the existing status and functions of the democracy theories of post-modernity, which contributed to the connection between communicative theory, universal pragmatics and discourse ethics by means of thinking mode of post-metaphysics---intersubjectivity, contextualization of reason and the linguistics turn. He also put forward the double-structure of language, explanation of communicative competence, validity claims of the speech act, ideal speech context, D principle and U principle, and the procedural demands of deliberative principles, which established the normative foundation of communication and the platform of Discourse argumentation.Furthermore, with communicative rationality Habermas laid a foundation for democratic politics, and thus made the rational justification of legitimacy of social order more persuasive. The previous democracy theories also interpreted the social order by means of reason (liberalism by instrumental reason and republicanism by value). Habermas, combining the advantages of both of them, emancipated democracy from the resistant and oppressed context by means of the procedural communicative reason and realized the social integration through discourse. Therefore, Habermas' communicative reason is a kind of necessary assumption of integrating a complex society which can contact the basic arrangements of social institution.Of course, Habermas deliberative democracy is still a "perfect conception" and a test model, and a kind of pure "thought experiments" without impurities. The main deficiencies of deliberative democracy consist mainly in the following three aspects. First, deliberative democracy evidently influenced by the German idealism is generally a conceptual project, and it would probably be more appropriate to be interpreted as a tool in understanding and interpreting the world. Second, Habermas focused more attention on the construction of the ideal domain of deliberation while ignored the indoctrination with the deliberative subjects -to develop the intellectual ability and quality of the public citizens from the perspective of citizenship, which is precisely the necessary factors of successful deliberation. Third, although proposing the two-track deliberation mode, Habermas' deliberative democracy theory still stays on the theoretical level, and his investigation into the practice and institutionalization of deliberative democracy is insufficient and unsystematic, especially in the design of the valid connection between the formal and informal deliberative mechanism.The last part of this dissertation comes to the conclusion that the prospect of deliberative democracy, to some extent, benefits from the technical support and the elimination of information asymmetry in information era. The combination of deliberative democracy with practice will probably have even brighter future. As for the future application of deliberative democracy in China, although no systematic thoughts of deliberative democracy have ever been formed, China has a long historical tradition of negotiation and consultation which has been carrying out the deliberative cooperation mode and the decision-making mode of deliberative science and democracy. The tradition of negotiation and consultation in China provides advantageous historical and cultural contexts for the settlement of deliberative democracy. Therefore, to adhere to the fundamental principles of Marxism, insist on scientific outlook on development, and critically absorb the beneficial elements from deliberative democracy theory are theoretically and realistically significant for the Chinese communist party to strengthen and improve its leadership, and actively and steadily promote the process of the inner-party and social democracy, and consolidate the party's governing position.