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ABSTRACT
Deliberative democracy aspires to secure political liberty by making citizens the authors of their laws. But how can it do this in the face of deep disagreement, not to mention imperfect knowledge and limited altruism? Deliberative democracy can secure political liberty by affording each citizen an equal position as a co-author of public laws and norms. Moreover, fundamental deliberative democracy—in which institutional design is ultimately accountable to public deliberation but not necessarily subject to its direct control—does not strain knowledge or altruism. Thus, there is a place for deliberative democracy in a robust political economy.
Notes
1. It is important to distinguish the classical liberalism under discussion here from libertarianism as a system of political morality. According to libertarian political morality, individuals hold very strong natural property rights that render most government intrusion immoral. While classical liberals may endorse libertarian political morality (and some do), they need not do so, and I will not assume that they do. In particular, I do not mean to attribute any such political morality to Pennington. For a treatment (but not an endorsement) of libertarian political morality, see Brennan and Jaworski Citation2016, 22-23.
2. The literature on deliberative democracy is enormous and highly various. Two important strands of contemporary deliberative democratic thought are grounded in the work of Jürgen Habermas (Citation1984) and John Rawls (1996). While Habermas takes a critical-theory approach that emphasizes the need to free communication from the grips of ideology through rational discourse, Rawls emphasizes deliberation as way for citizens to arrive, through the exchange of publicly valid reasons, at institutions justifiable to all.
3. Pennington seems to endorse a version of wide classical liberalism insofar as he urges that even political entities should emerge from, and remain subject to, spontaneous competition with one another: “The state . . . although a particularly powerful organization should be just one of many other similar organizations, constrained in its powers by the existence of competitors” (6).
4. Readers will recognize the idea of freedom from personal power as one central to recent “neo-republican” works by Philip Pettit (Citation1997, 2001, and Citation2012), Frank Lovett (2012) and Quentin Skinner (Citation1997), among others. While my argument here is highly indebted to these authors, I resist the republican label, since I reject the notion that there is anything like a sharp distinction between the republican tradition and a separate liberal one. For other recent (though slightly different) arguments to the effect that deliberative democracy secures freedom from personal power, see Rostbøll Citation2008 and Gourevitch Citation2013. It is also important to distinguish my position from that of Carol C. Gould. According to Gould, participatory democracy supports positive freedom as self-development (Gould Citation1988). She might be right about this, but my thesis is about the relationship between deliberative democracy and the absence of personal dependence, not the presence of the capacity for self-development.
5. Rostbøll (Citation2008) is right, I think, to distinguish dimensions of political freedom from conceptions of political freedom. Different conceptions of freedom are different ways of analyzing the concept of freedom. As such, they are inherently competitive. If, for instance, the “republican” conception of freedom as non-domination is right, the “liberal” conception of freedom as non-interference (e.g., Kramer Citation2008) is wrong. Different dimensions of freedom, by contrast, are different ways freedom manifests itself in relation to different moral and social demands, or under different circumstances. As such, different dimensions of freedom are not necessarily incompatible with one another; freedom may have, for instance, both a non-domination dimension and a non-interference dimension.
6. Hayek ([1960] Citation2011, 59) endorses the “time-honored” definition of freedom as “the possibility of a person's acting according to his own decisions and plans, in contrast with the position of one who was irrevocably subject to the will of another.” Similarly, Rousseau (Citation1997, 9) writes in the Discourse on Political Economy: “If someone can compel my will, I am no longer free.”
7. For discussion of this example, see Pettit Citation1997, 22-23.
8. Smith ([1776] Citation1981, 400) writes of the “burghers” who emerged with early capitalism and the corresponding demise of feudalism: “The principal attributes of villanage and slavery being thus taken away from them, they now, at least, became really free in our present sense of the word Freedom.” For a contemporary development of the idea that markets secure independent status, see Taylor Citation2013.
9. For remarks in this spirit, see Gaus Citation2003 and Brennan and Lomasky Citation2006.
10. Pettit expresses a similar idea: “The only way in which the state can operate effectively and yet satisfy the demands of republican legitimacy is by giving each of its citizens an equal share in a system of joint control” (Pettit Citation2012, 168).
11. Alex Gourevitch defends a version of this view. See Gourevitch Citation2013.
12. Pettit emphasizes public contestation in his own account of independence-preserving democracy. See Pettit Citation2012, 213-14.
13. G. A. Cohen has effectively pointed out that even if any individual could, at any time, rise in the socio-economic hierarchy, this does little to ameliorate the moral character of that hierarchy if any individual's ascension to a better socio-economic place is contingent upon others failing to do so. Where the ability to take advantage of an opportunity is thus conditional on others failing to do so, we may say that people are “collectively unfree” with respect to that opportunity, even if each individual is free with respect to it. See Cohen Citation2006, 180-182
14. John Tomasi (Citation2012, 180-96) offers an argument along these lines.
15. For a treatment of this literature and some of its implications, see Somin Citation2013.