European Journal of Social Theory

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Deliberative Democracy and Two Models of Pragmatism

Matthew Festenstein
European Journal of Social Theory 2004 7: 291
DOI: 10.1177/1368431004044194

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European Journal of Social Theory 7(3): 291–306

Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

Deliberative Democracy and Two

Models of Pragmatism
Matthew Festenstein
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD, UK

Abstract
This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of delib-
erative 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.

Key words
■ deliberation ■ democracy ■ John Dewey ■ practical reason ■ pragmatism

Public deliberation is now well ensconced as an object of research and dispute

among social and political theorists. At the core of this ‘deliberative turn’ (Dryzek,
2000: 1) in democratic thought is the intuition that democracy comprises more
than just a majoritarian procedure of decision-making, or a site for the tug of
competing forces, but also consists in the exchange of reasons and arguments.
This is usually elaborated as a normative case, to the effect that this process of
exchange constitutes or enhances the normative desirability of democratic
arrangements, especially or perhaps exclusively in modern, complex, highly
‘differentiated’ societies (Habermas, 1996; Warren, 2002). It comes in many
versions: some emphasize the search for consensus through the political process,
while others are satisfied with the ‘agonistic’ drama of conflicting political
positions; some seek to incorporate the essentials of liberal constitutionalism
while others put every political principle potentially up for grabs in the political
process.
So, to paraphrase Knight and Johnson (1999), what should a pragmatist make
of deliberative democracy? Knight and Johnson’s question, about what a prag-
matist might make of rational choice theory, contained a mild provocation: a
common view of pragmatism is that it is opposed to some of the key tenets of
rational choice theory (Whitford, 2002), and Knight and Johnson wish to estab-
lish that rational choice theories have their place in the pragmatist view of social
and political understanding. By contrast, the question asked here may seem

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292 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

merely mild without being provocative, since pragmatism is often held to be

supportive of deliberative democracy, even if there are, of course, other support-
ive moral and epistemological accounts that can be invoked in support of the
latter doctrine. Pragmatism has been called on in this context by a number of
writers concerned with democratic deliberation, including Jürgen Habermas
(1992: 149), Axel Honneth (1998), James Bohman (1999), Cheryl Misak
(2000), Henry Richardson (2000), James Tully (2002), Judith Baker (1998), and
Jack Knight and James Johnson (1994, 1997, 1999). The precise character of the
connection imputed varies, of course, according to the conceptions possessed of
deliberation and of pragmatism. The absence of any unitary understanding of
either of our key terms suggests that there is no single (and certainly no uncon-
troversial) account of how to relate the two. Indeed, some political philosophers,
including (in different ways) Charles Larmore (1996, 1999; cf. Dyzenhaus,
1998) and Richard Rorty (1991) have suggested that pragmatism comports
better with the style of liberal constitutionalist politics for which a range of poten-
tial topics for political debate are deliberately removed as candidates for public
discussion, in order to safeguard central rights and interests of citizens, rather
than made subject to democratic discourse.
By pragmatism, I mean an outlook characterized by the following commit-
ments. For pragmatists, the nerve of its account of rationality is a ‘radical holism’
which
. . . does not privilege or prejudice any domain of inquiry . . . It does not pronounce
that there are separate orders of fact and value or of the causal and the normative and
then go on to glorify the factual/causal and denigrate the evaluative/normative.
(Misak, 2000: 86)

This is grounded in a view that practice, rather than theory, is at the heart of all
knowledge, and that the distinctions to be drawn between different domains of
inquiry can only be drawn in the light of practice. We can move beyond the Scylla
of objectivism and the Charybdis of relativism by locating all practices of inquiry
and reasoning in the deliberative and practical orientation of the agents (Putnam,
1981; Bernstein, 1983). Reasoning is understood as process of deliberation; that
is, as a goal-directed activity. Like other activities, it is pursued in order to achieve
particular goals, and in its course one’s goals may change, new conceptions of
what one is doing emerge and indeed who one is may emerge, etc.
Viewed as an interconnected whole, the web of belief contains no component
that is ring-fenced by philosophers against corrigibility (as sense data or analytic
truths have been thought to be, for example). For the pragmatic commitment to
fallibilism, even those beliefs and norms in which we have the utmost conviction
may turn out to be false. Any belief is vulnerable to revision – but only by refer-
ence to other beliefs that are held to be ‘settled’ or ‘stable’ for the purposes of
judging this belief (cf. Putnam, 1994: 152; Larmore, 1996: 59–60). Fallibilism
is not a doctrine which casts a miasma of doubt over all beliefs or any particular
belief; rather, it insists that when we question a belief we must do so for specific,
justifiable reasons, and that therefore we cannot call all our beliefs into question

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 293

at once. We can therefore view our beliefs both as rooted in history and practice,
and as subject to justification, and rational criticism. Pragmatism starts from the
belief that reason itself cannot ground all our beliefs. We can only begin to reason
on the basis of the beliefs and practices that we already have – we cannot call
everything into question all at once – and these are given to us by historical
contingency.
For pragmatism, the criteria for what counts as a better or worse way of coping
are not pre-given and external to this process, but are hammered out through it:
what we have are practices which are right are wrong, depending on how they square
with our standards. And our standards are right or wrong depending on how they
square with our practices. This is a circle or, better, a spiral – but a virtuous one.
(Putnam, 1990: 304)
There is no privileged or Archimedean point outside this spiral from which to
assess either practices or standards. As Raymond Geuss writes, glossing Dewey:
We accept theories because they have been developed using the most appropriate
available methods, because they satisfy our relevant standards of evaluation, and
because they work (i.e. they allow us to do what we wish to do with the theories in
question); we use the methods we do because they have shown themselves to be
efficient in allowing us to come up with acceptable theories. (2001: 125)
In the pragmatist picture of inquiry, any element is open to potential revision:
the unit of agency (the individual, some corporate or collective agent), the agent’s
goals, surroundings, criteria for a good solution to a problem, relevant methods,
etc. (Festenstein, 2002: 6; cf. Graham, 2002: 140). In any particular inquiry, one
or more of these must be taken to be fixed, for the inquiry to get off the ground:
as fallibilism insists, we cannot throw everything into question all at once.
Even such a basic account of pragmatism is contentious, and tilted toward
those conceptions that I think are most fruitful in reflecting on the relationship
between pragmatism and democratic deliberation, in particular those that come
down from C.S. Peirce and John Dewey. It almost goes without saying that prag-
matism is a contested concept, subject to multiple, sometimes conflicting defi-
nitions.1 In the discussion below I will try to flesh out a distinction between two
different ways of viewing pragmatism and its relationship to democratic deliber-
ation. But this focus on this conception of pragmatism is not intended to suggest
that other approaches (for example, Rorty’s) are irrelevant to understanding the
relationship of politics to pragmatism.2
This article proceeds as follows. In the next section, I set out an account of
democratic deliberation, which tries to draw together a set of themes that have
concerned various writers on deliberative democracy. I go on to argue that
theories of deliberative democracy face a problem, which has been nicely set out
by Henry Richardson and James Bohman (Richardson, 1997; Bohman, 1998),
of how to conceive of democratic deliberation as at once responsive to the wishes
and claims of participants (that is, as democratic) and as a process of practical
reasoning (that is, as deliberative). Then I distinguish two models of pragmatism
and democratic deliberation, one of which is Cheryl Misak’s Peircean account of

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294 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

inquiry and the other of which is built up from some important parts of Dewey’s
thought. Misak’s account, I argue, grasps one horn of Richardson’s dilemma, and
is deliberative rather than democratic. A Deweyan account can keep both these
elements in a more satisfactory equilibrium, although it also raises a substantial
problem of justification.

Deliberative Commitments3

The theory of deliberative democracy is usually viewed as an account of the legit-

imacy of political decisions. It expresses an ideal of democratic decision-making
as a process of reasoned public discussion of arguments for and against some
proposal with the aim of arriving at a judgement which is generally acceptable.
Arguments for deliberative democracy have been overwhelmingly concerned
with establishing that democracy conceived as a process of this sort possesses a
legitimacy lacking from democratic procedures which are understood merely as
mechanisms for the aggregation of private interests or preferences. Proponents of
deliberative democracy argue that the process of debate, discussion and persua-
sion prior to the aggregation of votes is crucial for the legitimacy of the outcome.
The literature on deliberative democracy has generally been concerned to flesh
out the details of the contrast with accounts of democracy focused on the aggre-
gation of votes, to offer a fuller specification of the reasons to prefer deliberative
democracy, and to suggest ways in which this ideal conception may be employed,
as a critical criterion or as a model for institutional design (Bohman, 1996;
Bohman and Rehg, 1997; Bohman, 1998; Elster, 1998; Dryzek, 2000;
D’Entrèves, 2002; Tully, 2002).
Deliberative democracy is usually distinguished from a ‘republican’ account
of political participation, for which the activity of deliberation possesses what
Jon Elster calls a non-instrumental value for participants. There is no presump-
tion that political participation has this sort of value for participants, which
views political activity as beneficial regardless of the success or failure of that
activity in achieving the agent’s goals (Elster, 1997: 19). Citizens may view
political activity in that way, but the standard conception of deliberative democ-
racy does not require them to do so. Advocates of deliberative democracy,
particularly in the Habermasian tradition, distinguish their account from what
they call republicanism, on a related issue. While republicans emphasize the
importance of public discussion, they view deliberation as a way of integrating
a society through expressing a shared commitment to a particular common good
(Habermas, 1998: 239–52).4 By contrast, for deliberativists there is no
presumption that a regime of deliberative democracy will eradicate these differ-
ences among political goals. As Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson write of
one sort of difference, moral conflict, ‘moral disagreement is a condition with
which we must learn to live, not merely an obstacle to be overcome on the way
to a just society’ (1996: 26).
Democratic deliberation is usually understood as a process of public discussion

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 295

or debate, but not just any process of discussion counts as deliberation. Deliber-
ative theorists, from various directions, converge on the following set of commit-
ments or obligations as characterizing the deliberative process. First, participants
are under the obligation to offer arguments persuasive to all other participants in
the deliberative process. On the standard conception of deliberative democracy,
participants in the deliberative process are required not only to offer arguments
but to offer arguments persuasive to all: there is no presumption then that some
members of the deliberating body do not count. As Joshua Cohen puts it, delib-
eration aims at finding ‘reasons persuasive to all who are committed to acting’ on
its results, and participants are committed to ‘providing reasons that they
sincerely expect to be persuasive to others who share that commitment’ (1997a:
75–6). This is not of course to impose the impossible requirement that one’s argu-
ments should agree with all the beliefs of one’s interlocutors: the point is precisely
to change their minds, at least with respect to the proposal at hand. There is
plainly a question here about the limits to the duty to offer generally persuasive
arguments: if I persist in failing to draw the simplest inference from your argu-
ments, or base my reception of them on bizarre or horrible assumptions, how
long should you pour resources into trying to communicate with me? But I want
here provisionally to accept this commitment as an intelligible as well as an essen-
tial component of deliberative democracy.
Second, participants are committed to responding to the reasons and argu-
ments of others qua reasons and arguments. What is meant to matter in delib-
eration is not bargaining power, but only the force of the better argument:
participants give their reasons ‘with the expectation that those reasons (and not,
for example, power) will settle the fate of their proposal’ (Cohen, 1997a: 74; cf.
Miller, 2000: 53–60). This exercises a crucial equalizing constraint in the delib-
erative process. If participants are not under this duty, then they are free to
respond to the relative bargaining strength of others, with the result that those
positioned so as to stymie the process of decision-making, to help build a coali-
tion, or to offer an attractive deal, will benefit at the expense of those who lack
such bargaining resources. This obligation then means that the arguments and
point of view of the weak are taken into consideration, although there is no
presumption that a position of weakness itself confers any particular authority on
their arguments or point of view. Here too there is a question about limits: ought
one to take seriously into consideration, in this sense, any point of view or
argument, say, that of a proponent of slavery (cf. Johnson, 1998: 169–70)? Some
writers suggest that there are features of the process of public deliberation which
help to launder it of horrible reasons and unsupportable proposals (Dryzek,
2000: 45–7). Others insist on the necessity of ‘entry rules’, pre-political norma-
tive criteria which mark out some points of view and arguments ex ante as un-
reasonable and therefore not admissible into the deliberative process (Gutmann,
1993; Gutmann and Thompson, 1996).
Third, participants are committed to modifying proposals in the light of
reasons and arguments put forward in the deliberative process in order to arrive
at a commonly acceptable or inclusive proposal. We should distinguish this from

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296 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

the implausible demand that participants are required always to arrive at an agree-
ment which is wholly satisfactory for all (Warren, 2002: 185). However, I think
that deliberative democracy requires more than merely the exchange of reasons
among participants prepared to listen to one another.5
Only on a narrowly rationalist interpretation of deliberation is this latter
commitment collapsed into the first two. From a rationalist perspective, the
emergence of good reasons for some proposal is a sufficient condition for the
parties in deliberation to agree on it. If all the good arguments favour redirect-
ing resources away from the building of trunk roads and into the improvement
of railways, then the latter policy is held to have been vindicated in deliberation.
However, this misconceives deliberation in an important way, since the reasons
given for a proposal are often not a sufficient condition for convergence on it.
For public deliberation is not usually understood purely as a process of exchange
of reasons, filtering out the bad ones, but as a forum in which the point of view
of each is taken seriously. But taking someone’s point of view seriously in this
context cannot be a matter of listening to her patiently and then explaining to
her why she is wrong, lacking in good reasons for her point of view. At the other
extreme, it cannot be a matter of simply conglomerating every expressed perspec-
tive into some proposal that will wholly satisfy each participant. Rather, deliber-
ation treads a via media. The public airing of reasons endows an outcome with
transparency, even for those who lose out by virtue of the outcome and to those
not persuaded by the reasons on offer for it (cf. Miller, 2000: 142). At the same
time, the opinions, preferences and interests of participants (and those they repre-
sent) count as pro tanto reasons in this process.6
A theory of deliberative democracy then faces a problem: to find a way, as
Richardson puts it, ‘of conceiving of public decision-making that is at once
sufficiently cognitive to make it truly deliberative and also sufficiently responsive
to the positions of individual citizens to count as democratic’ (Richardson, 1997:
359). On the one hand, deliberation, if it is to be distinguished as a process of
collective practical reasoning distinct from interest-group bargaining, log-rolling,
the imposition of a particular dominant group’s views, and so on, appears to
require standards both for judging outcomes and for recognizing a good reason
within the process independent of the outcomes of particular political processes.
On the other hand, setting up such standards threatens to denigrate the contri-
bution of citizens to what is to be done, the status of their will as a ground for
action. If we dismiss the first dimension, by taking the view that the democratic
process is wholly constitutive of what is to be done, and therefore that there is
no space for an external standard of criticism within deliberative democracy, we
make the notion of collective deliberation mysterious, since it leaves no space for
the thought that participants inside the process are deliberating about what ought
to be done. Whatever standards we (where ‘we’ includes citizens themselves) use
to criticize a particular outcome are necessarily external to the deliberative process
itself. If we dismiss the second dimension, then the deliberative process is viewed
in merely instrumental terms, as providing access to a set of good reasons whose
validity is independent of the deliberative process.

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 297

This dilemma corresponds to two different justificatory accounts of delibera-

tive democracy (Bohman, 1998). On one side, there are those who argue that the
reasons that pass the test of publicity are by virtue of passing that test valid,
convincing or correct. The deliberative process is then constitutive of the validity
of the outcomes. In Rawls’s terminology, the deliberative process is a pure
procedure, answerable to no independent criterion of rightness: for example, if
we each freely place a series of fair bets, then whatever distribution of cash that
results is fair, in this sense. To view deliberative democracy in this way sees it as
an arena in which each participant enters into the process of discussion on fair
terms. By contrast, an imperfect procedure is one which is framed so as to give
the correct result, where the outcome of the procedure is answerable to an inde-
pendent criterion of validity. A criminal trial, for example, when it is properly
conducted, can issue in the wrong result, such as the conviction of an innocent
defendant (Rawls, 1972: 84–5). On the other side of the deliberative debate are
those who view democratic deliberation as an imperfect procedure, aiming at
necessarily procedure-independent standards. From the latter perspective, pure
proceduralism is ‘insensitive to reasons’, particularly to what makes them
compelling or not (Estlund, 1997: 197): qua deliberation, the process aims to
improve the reasons upon which basis collective action is taken, where this is
something more than allowing each viewpoint a fair chance to be listened to.
We can distinguish two ways of addressing this dilemma. One is to take the
view that there are values independent of the deliberative value of democracy for
inclusiveness, which should constrain or condition the way in which the epis-
temic goals of deliberation are pursued. Certain substantive values – of fairness
or equality, perhaps – ought to be balanced with the commitment to delibera-
tion, and restrain the commitment to deliberation from sliding into support of
the idea that political inclusiveness should be sacrificed in order to come up with
a more deliberatively sensitive procedure. There is an analogy with a judicial
proceeding which may get nearer the truth by coercing or terrorizing witnesses,
but is constrained by norms of just treatment. However, another reason for resist-
ing this distortion of judicial procedure is internal to the goals of the procedure:
that this system undermines the conditions under which truth can emerge, for
example, by making witnesses too compliant with the perceived needs of court
or state. For this second, internal response, deliberation itself entails a commit-
ment to inclusiveness; inclusiveness is not an independent value, and does not
act to constrain deliberation, but partly constitutes a procedure as deliberative.
If deliberation requires inclusiveness, then a commitment to deliberation is not
at constant risk of slipping into a belief in Platonic guardians or even into Mill’s
support for extra votes for the university-educated, requiring counterweight from
external values of fairness or equality. If an internal response can be had, it
possesses an important advantage over the external response. For the external
response raises the question of how we view the standpoint from which values of
fairness are balanced with deliberative considerations; at this level too the
dilemma between two models of procedural justice, and sensitivity to two sorts
of consideration, opens up. By contrast, an internal response stops this regress,

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298 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

since, if successful, it shows how consideration for inclusiveness is built into the
deliberative commitment.

Two Models of Pragmatism and Deliberation

In this section, I want to distinguish between two models of inquiry-centred

pragmatism, which offer different internal responses to the deliberative
dilemma.7 The first model has been given a lucid statement by Misak, who draws
on Peirce (Misak, 2000). For pragmatism, the active search for well-grounded
beliefs about how to deal with social and political problems entails a set of non-
discretionary commitments on the part of anyone who wants such beliefs. Why
search for such beliefs? The first step is that such a search is intelligible, in the
sense that ethical and political beliefs and positions are not viewed as insulated
from rational appraisal (Putnam, 1991, 1994: 151–220; Misak, 2000). Second,
the search for true beliefs involves pragmatist canons of inquiry; no belief is held
to be a priori certain or beyond the reach of criticism and revision. Third, the
search for a well-grounded belief involves testing claims against as wide a range
of different experiences as possible. In particular, it requires us to seek out and
attend to different perspectives and arguments, in order to test and, if necessary,
revise our current conceptions. Our beliefs and judgements aim at being true,
and being true, on this pragmatist account, means fitting with reasons and experi-
ence. This apparently innocuous condition has critical bite:
Engaging in genuine moral inquiry – searching for principles and for particular judge-
ments which will not be susceptible to recalcitrant experience and argument – requires
that we take our beliefs to be responsive to new arguments and sensibilities about what
is good, cruel, kind, oppressive, worthwhile, or just. Those who neglect or denigrate
the experiences of others because of their gender, skin colour, or sexual orientation are
adopting a very bad means for arriving at true or rational beliefs. They can be criti-
cised for failing to aim at truth properly. (Misak, 2000: 104)
This general methodological principle provides support for political deliberation.
We test our political principles and judgements by exposing them to as wide a
range as possible of different arguments, reasons, and experience. Public
discussion open to all, together with appropriate mechanisms for the implemen-
tation, criticism and revision of decisions arrived at, seems to provide the best
means for this. And to duck this process of public discussion, then, is to evade
the responsibility to act on the basis of the best judgements that one can reach.
None of this entails making the unwarranted and distinct assertion that there will
always be convergence on a single point of view on every issue, or that decisions
will not sometimes have to be made in the absence of conclusive reasons pointing
one way or the other on some contested issue (Misak, 2000: 136–54). This
accords with a point made in the previous section; decisions may have to be made
in the absence of a determinate rational solution, and in the light of a range of
evaluative considerations.

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 299

This argument rests on a claim that is conditional but thought to be fairly

uncontroversial: that we value the truth, and so value the conditions under which
we can arrive at true beliefs. This is a premise that we may reject, but, Misak
thinks, on the whole we will not; she claims that it is ‘relatively uncontentious’
that ‘everybody claims to be after’ true beliefs (Misak, 2000: 107). This is true,
if one considers everybody principally as inquirers, but it is not even relatively
uncontentious that everybody chases true beliefs at the expense of pursuing other
interests and goals. Political agents may put other considerations, such as building
coalitions, ahead of adhering to the conditions for the production of a true belief.
Here this sort of pragmatist may respond that pragmatism provides some critical
leverage on this course of action, and this is exactly the point of the pragmatist
account of truth and deliberation. Yet this response begs the question, since we
can challenge the assumption that the commitment of the idealized truth-seeker
in politics is the appropriate standpoint from which to criticize particular agents.
Another response to this objection is in effect concessive, allowing that this
objection points to a limit of the pragmatist account, but that this limit should
not be understood as a flaw. Pragmatism is concerned to show that the search for
truth in inquiry imposes certain constraints on inquirers, but this argument is
not the only, or even primary, way in which the beliefs and actions of others can
be praised or criticized (Misak, 2000: 124). In thinking about why a democracy
should be inclusive and accommodating, we should appeal to a different level of
argument. First, we may appeal to ‘substantive principles of morality’ such as a
judgement that others ought to be treated with consideration and respect.
Second, particularly in the case of deliberative democracy, we may judge that
‘listening to others increases the likelihood that law and policy will be accepted’
(Misak, 2000: 125). It is important to make the distinction between these levels
of argument if we are to avoid concluding, with Benhabib (1992: 37–8) that the
reason that we ought not to inflict unnecessary suffering on others is that doing
so would undermine the possibility of dialogue with them. In other words, the
pragmatist can and should allow the weight and normativity of a range of
considerations in practical deliberation, independent of the higher-order judge-
ment about the necessary conditions for inquiry. This response embraces an
external position, in the sense outlined in the previous section, however: the
values on which democratic inclusiveness is based are independent of the precon-
ditions of inquiry. The commitment to inquiry gets us only as far as what may
be called non-democratic inclusiveness: the inquirer must be open to the input
of all, but that is different from holding that all should have a say in the output,
since it is open to the inquirer to dismiss the opinions and interests that are
expressed, on the grounds that they are flawed, not properly thought through,
ignorant of relevant facts, and so on.
The second model, which is found in Dewey’s political philosophy, offers a
different account of the relationship of inquiry to democracy. This views the epis-
temic virtues of inquiry as partly constitutive of a wider conception of human
flourishing.8 That conception of flourishing entails a more intimate engagement
with the needs and interests of others than the first model requires. There are

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300 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

three important steps here. The first is an argument to the effect that an ‘experi-
mental attitude’ on the part of individuals, and groups of individuals, toward
their beliefs, goals and values is intelligible (Dewey, 1939). Dewey attacks a
variety of instrumental models of practical reasoning, which confine the scope of
practical reason to the working out of efficient means to pre-given ends. Instead,
he argues, we can reason about ends, not just means, and that this liberates us
from a ‘mechanical’ picture of individual and social deliberation (Festenstein,
1997: Chapter 2; Richardson, 2000). As he puts it in ‘The Need for Recovery of
Philosophy’ (1917):
The pragmatic theory of intelligence means that the function of mind is to project
new and more complex ends – to free experience from routine and from caprice. Not
the use of thought to accomplish purposes already given either in the mechanism of
the body or in that of the existent state of society, but the use of intelligence to liberate
and liberalize action, is the pragmatic lesson. Action restricted to given and fixed ends
may attain great technical efficiency; but efficiency is the only quality to which it can
lay claim. Such action is mechanical (or becomes so), no matter what the scope of the
pre-formed end, be it the Will of God or Kultur. But the doctrine that intelligence
develops within the sphere of action for the sake of possibilities not yet given is the
opposite of a doctrine of mechanical efficiency. Intelligence as intelligence is inher-
ently forward-looking; only by ignoring its primary function does it become a mere
means for an end already given. The latter is servile, even when the end is labelled
moral, religious or esthetic. But action directed to ends to which the agent has not
previously been attached carries with it a quickened and enlarged spirit. A pragmatic
intelligence is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic. (Dewey, 1993: 6–7)

Pragmatic intelligence will lead us to formulate and attach ourselves to new ends,
and free us from arbitrariness, coercion or inertia in our choice of ends.9 The
second step to delineate, then, is that the exercise of practical intelligence or
experimental inquiry is viewed as liberating, promoting the ‘growth’ of those who
submit their ends to reflective consideration in this way, which is viewed not only
as a sort of autonomy but as a condition of well-being or ‘final happiness’ for a
person (Dewey, 1932: 302–8).
The final step is to view growth as requiring a certain kind of engagement with
the needs and interests of others. Human beings are interdependent in multi-
farious ways, particularly in complex modern societies, and we cannot envisage
individual growth outside of any social context. Rather, individual growth can
only be achieved by an appropriate responsiveness to ‘the needs and claims of
others’ (Dewey, 1932: 304). Dewey approaches this conclusion from a number
of directions (Festenstein, 1997: Chapters 2 and 3; Festenstein, 2001), and I will
only tease out one relevant line of thought here. The core idea is that my own
growth is hampered or warped if it takes place at the expense of yours. This is a
move with resonances in various sorts of social and political philosophy – in
idealism, Hegelian theories of recognition, and Rousseauian accounts of liberty
and the general will (cf. Dent, 1988; Nicholson, 1990; Taylor, 1992; Honneth,
1995, 1998). It is also a deeply contentious move; for cannot my growth be at
your expense, and, indeed, in many real-world circumstances, won’t it be

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 301

(Festenstein, 1997: 58–62)? I want to pass over this sceptical cavil for the
moment. If we accept the claim about the mutual interdependence of paths of
growth, however, the argument proceeds as follows. A condition of your growth
is your being able to exercise pragmatic intelligence in shaping the individual and
collective ends that govern you. In this way, my growth requires inclusion of your
exercise of pragmatic intelligence in collective deliberations in which we both
share. To pull the threads of this discussion together, then; inquiry as pragmatic
intelligence is valued as a constitutive part of a life of growth, not merely as an
instrumental means of achieving pre-given ends. Growth for individuals requires
the right social conditions; my growth or flourishing is mutually interdependent
with yours, and therefore requires that you are able to exercise pragmatic intelli-
gence in the making of collective decisions on the same footing as me. In other
words, I can find your point of view to be deliberatively flawed, but nevertheless
it acts as a ‘self-originating’ claim on me, by virtue of being yours.
This is not, I think, an external account of the value of inclusiveness. The
external account considered in the previous section rested on values independent
of those of deliberation; you should be fair to me (listen patiently, and so on),
even though my point of view is deliberatively flawed. From the Peircean perspec-
tive, too, the reasons to be inclusive are of different orders; strictly as a pragma-
tist, so to speak, you include me only as a source of input for deliberation, while
there are other, ‘first-order’ reasons to treat me respectfully in the political process.
The pragmatist rationale for inclusion is not a rationale for inclusion on a demo-
cratic basis, however, and so the first-order reasons take up the slack, resulting in
an external account. The Deweyan model aspires to be an internal account, in
the sense that the values that require inclusiveness are not independent of the
epistemic virtues of deliberation. For it suggests that the exercise of practical intel-
ligence, if it is to be valuable, must be informed by a substantive consideration
for the interests of others (cf. Dewey, 1927: 127–8). I say ‘informed’ rather than
‘constrained’, since any assessment of interests is corrigible and open to revision,
on this account.

Conclusion

This article has been concerned with elaborating a dilemma encountered in the
theory of deliberative democracy and showing how two models of pragmatism
approach it. Both models share a view of inquiry as fallible, open and practical.
The first model starts with the search for true beliefs, and finds in the precondi-
tions for this some reasons to adhere to norms of openness and inclusiveness. The
second model starts from a conception of inquiry as a constitutive element of a
well-lived life. The reason that we have for valuing inquiry is a reason, on this
account of human flourishing, for valuing openness and inclusion, in addition
to the role that the latter epistemic virtues play as preconditions of well-
conducted inquiry. These are, I think, the two dominant ways in which the core
pragmatist notion of inquiry can be developed for social and political thought. I

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302 European Journal of Social Theory 7(3)

have not offered a justification either of the core pragmatist conception of inquiry
set out above, nor of the models already discussed, and only compared them as
differing forms of internal response to the deliberative dilemma. Any conclusions
offered can only be tentative therefore, and suggestive of lines of inquiry, rather
than providing summary judgements of the fruitfulness of these models. The
principal challenge for the first model of pragmatism identified here flows from
its incompleteness as an account of the basis of inclusiveness. This may ultimately
prove to be an appropriately modest assessment of what can be squeezed out of
a commitment to pragmatism’s epistemic virtues. In that case, however, this
commitment must take its chances among a range of independent values in delib-
eration, and can make no particular claim to weight or priority. The challenge
facing the second model is the requirement to vindicate the conception of flour-
ishing that underpins its claims about inquiry.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the AHRB Research Leave Scheme, Cheryl Misak, Patrick Baert
and this journal’s reviewer.

Notes

1 For a classic early statement, see Lovejoy (1966); and see Brodsky (1971); Bernstein
(1991: 323–40, 1995).
2 On Rorty, see Festenstein and Thompson (2001); Festenstein (2003).
3 There is a fuller discussion of this theme in Festenstein (2002a, 2002b).
4 Exemplars of republicanism in this sense that are sometimes invoked include Arendt
(1958) and Sandel (1996). As Charles Larmore notes (1996: 211), this account of the
distinction between deliberation and republicanism ties the latter too closely to the
communitarian invocation of the politics of the common good. For the strand of civic
republicanism represented paradigmatically by Machiavelli’s Discorsi, the core appeal is
not to a common conception of the good life or to the claim that political participation
is a privileged form of human activity. Rather, this strand of republicanism emphasizes
the importance of active citizenship and the need to support the rule of law necessary
for liberty, see Skinner (1998); Pettit (1996); Bellamy (1999). It is harder to distance
any reasonably full specification of the demands of deliberative democracy from repub-
licanism, in this sense, see Festenstein (2002a).
5 Here I am riding roughshod over an important point, which there is no space to address
adequately here. Some theorists claim that the transformation of preferences is part of
the goal of deliberative democracy (Manin, 1987; Sunstein, 1991), others that it is not
part of its goal, which consists only in the exchange of reasons among parties prepared
to be moved by the reasons of others (Cohen, 1997b: 413). Rather more needs to be
said too about the relationship of preference, popular sovereignty and reasoning
(Richardson, 1997; Richardson, 2002), but I hope that the basic idea is intelligible
here.
6 See Hurley (1989: 130–5). Prima facie reasons evaporate, so to speak, when confronted

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Festenstein Deliberative Democracy and Pragmatism 303

with stronger considerations; so my reason to shop for guacamole disappears when I

discover that I already have some. A pro tanto reason has a residual force, even in the
face of over-riding considerations for the agent; if I promise to help you move house,
the force of this reason does not evaporate even when some more compelling reason
for me to act appears (say, there is something interesting to watch on television).
7 There is another kind of internal response in Estlund (1997). Theorists elaborating
Habermas’s work on communicative reason also belong in this camp: Habermas (1996,
1998); Benhabib (1992, 2002).
8 On epistemic virtues, see Hookway (2000); on the link between pragmatist inquiry
and flourishing, see Putnam (1981).
9 On this theme, see also, for example, Dewey (1908: 320, 392; 1922: 138; 1935: 41);
and see Richardson (1998: 111).

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■ Matthew Festenstein is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield University.

His books include Pragmatism and Political Theory (1997) and Richard Rorty:
Critical Dialogues (2001). Address: Department of Politics, University of Sheffield,
Elmfield, Northumberland Road, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK. [email: m.i.Festenstein@
sheffield.ac.uk]

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