Discourse theory’s sociological claim

Abstract

In the quest for a workable ideal of democracy, the systems approach has recently shifted its perspective on deliberative democratic theory. Instead of enquiring how institutionalized decisionmaking might mirror an 'ideal deliberative procedure', it asks how democracy might be construed as a 'deliberative system'. This leads it to recommend de-emphasizing the role of parliament and focusing instead on non-institutionalized actors and communications. Though this increased emphasis is undoubtedly warranted, the importance of parliament must not be downplayed. In the debate about transnational democracy -and about EU democratization in particular -it is widely held that making democracy safe for transnational politics entails finding new, non-parliamentary ways of organizing it. Here, the deliberative systems perspective may be misunderstood as offering an alternative, non-parliamentary route to transnational democracy. This article argues that a deliberative system without a parliamentary legislature is tantamount to deliberation without democracy and that an elected parliamentary legislature is constitutive of democracy as a deliberative system -national or transnational. To substantiate this claim, the article suggests looking at Habermas' discourse theory in a new light, as a sociological-reconstructive approach that aims to explicate the cognitive dimension of modern democratic decision-making. Acknowledgement of discourse theory's sociological intent enhances our understanding of democracy as a deliberative system in two important ways. First, it helps elucidate the epistemic meaning of democracy differently from the accounts given in alternative theories. Discourse theory holds that what generates democratic legitimacy in modern democracies is a particular epistemic quality which the democratic process lends to decisions by enabling citizens to view the latter as valid outcomes of a cooperative practice of collective problem-solving among equals. From this pragmatist

Plural reconstruction: A method of critical theory for the analysis of emerging and contested political practices

“…In general, reconstructive methods can be described as ‘a form of critique that aims to employ normative potentials [that] transcend the agreed-upon norms of a society, but are, in some way or another, nevertheless already “immanent” in social reality’ (Stahl 2013, 534). In the following, I will focus on Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction, which has recently received renewed attention in the context of political theory’s ‘methodological turn’ (Gaus 2016; Iser 2008; Patberg 2014; Pedersen 2008; on the methodological turn, see Erman and Möller 2015). The aim of rational reconstruction is to identify ‘the implicitly assumed normative contents of empirically established practices […] from the participant perspective, i.e.…”