Political trust has become a central focus of political analysis and public lament. Political theorists and philosophers typically think of interpersonal trust in politics as a fragile but valuable resource for a flourishing or stable democratic polity. This article examines what conception of trust is needed in order to play this role. It unpicks two candidate answers, a moral and a responsiveness conception, the latter of which has been central to recent political theory in this area. It goes on to outline a third, commitment conception and to set out how a focus on commitments and their fulfilment provides a better account of trust for political purposes. Adopting this conception discloses how trust relies on a contestable public normative space and has significant implications for how we should approach three cognate topics, namely, judgments of trust, the place of distrust, and the relationship of interpersonal to institutional trust and distrust.The importance, fragility and dangers of trust and distrust have become increasingly central topics for political analysis and normative reflection, as well as for anguished political brooding. These themes dominate the extensive literature on how and 'why we hate politics', on the wide-scale erosion of public trust and confidence in government, and on the rise of anxieties about populism and its cultivated dialectic of distrust (of normal politics, parliaments, the system) and trust (of the leader, the movement) (e.g.,

On the face of it, self-censorship is profoundly subversive of democracy, particularly in its talk-centric forms, and undermines the culture of openness and publicity on which it relies. This paper has two purposes. The first is to develop a conception of self-censorship that allows us to capture what is distinctive about the concept from a political perspective and which allows us to understand the democratic anxiety about selfcensorship: if it is not obvious that biting our tongues is always wrong, we need a fuller account of the moral sensibility that finds it so troubling and this is elaborated here. The second is to develop an argument to the effect that this sensibility should not have the last, or only, word, but instead that self-censorship should be viewed as an Ôordinary viceÕ of democratic societies. The grounds for tolerating it rest on the democratic values that critics believe it threatens. Keywords Self-censorship, free speech, realism, democratic theory, power ! 2! I. IntroductionOn the face of it, self-censorship is profoundly subversive of democracy. In current political discourse, self-censorship is normally a source of anxiety, and held up as a symptom of a climate of fear, of the tyranny of the majority, stifling conformism, groupthink, McCarthyism, political correctness, or some other malign genie of democratic politics (Robin 2004). When self-censorship is invoked, it is almost always to be condemned, along with the cowardice and dishonesty of the self-censor, as part of an explanation of why some challenging opinion or inconvenient truth is not more widely discussed. De Tocqueville this country is driven by conformity. The law canÕt make people speak out Ð it can only prevent people from stopping free speech.WhatÕs happened is not censorship, but self-censorshipÓ. As George Orwell acidly put it, Òcircus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whipÓ. The uproar generated by the notorious cartoons first published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 sparked subsequent widespread fulminations over press self-censorship. It will be recalled that these cartoons depicted Muhammad in bomb-shaped headgear, wielding a cutlass, and saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide-bombers. In their From this perspective, self-censorship undermines an important and vulnerable condition of democratic societies: even in a democracy with welldeveloped liberal protections from political domination, including freedoms of speech, Òa central precondition for avoiding such domination is the existence of the public sphere, a space for the exercise of shared communicative freedomsÓ (Bohman 2010: 434). Self-censorship seems to pollute this space, constraining citizensÕ ability to speak to each other, to speak truth to power ! 4! and freely to express themselves. What gives rise to it are unacceptable and degrading relationships of power or influence.However, precisely what it is that is being...

This article provides a critical reconstruction of John Dewey's theory of social and political inquiry. Clearing away some misconceptions about this theory allows us to grasp its practical and political focus, and to see its similarities to other strands of anti-positivist social thought, including hermeneutics and critical theory. I go on to examine the relationship between democratic values and the theory of inquiry. Like recent proponents of discursive conceptions of democracy such as Habermas he sees a connection between democracy and the conditions for rational procedures of problem solving. What connects democracy to inquiry for Dewey is primarily ethical and political, rather than epistemological. The article considers what may be usefully taken from Dewey's conception of social inquiry, without accepting his full ethical agenda.

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

One of the most powerful but elusive motifs in pragmatist philosophy is the idea that a liberal democracy should be understood as a community of inquirers. This paper offers a critical appraisal of a recent attempt to make sense of this intuition in the context of contemporary political theory, in what may be called pragmatist political liberalism (PPL). Drawing together ideas from Rawlsian political liberalism, epistemic democracy and pragmatism, proponents of PPL argue that the pragmatist conception of inquiry can provide a satisfying interpretation of the idea of justificatory neutrality as it appears in political liberalism. This is contrasted with Dewey's understanding of the epistemic character of democracy, which is viewed as unacceptably sectarian. This paper identifies and criticizes the two principal lines of argument made in support of PPL: the clarification argument and the fixation argument. Neither of these lines of argument, it is argued, passes the test each sets itself. I argue that the latter closes down the epistemic openness in the justification of democracy that is central to pragmatism.