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Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox in Democratic Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2007

BONNIE HONIG
BONNIE HONIG
Affiliation:
Northwestern University and American Bar Foundation
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Abstract

Deliberative democratic theorists (in this essay, Seyla Benhabib and Jurgen Habermas) seek to resolve, manage, or transcend paradoxes of democratic legitimation or constitutional democracy. Other democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, embrace such paradoxes and affirm their irreducibility. Deliberativists call that position “decisionism.” This essay examines the promise and limits of these various efforts by way of a third paradox: Rousseau's paradox of politics, whose many workings are traced through Book II, Chapter 7 of the Social Contract. This last paradox cannot be resolved, transcended, managed, or even affirmed as an irreducible binary conflict. The paradox of politics names not a clash between two logics or norms but a vicious circle of chicken-and-egg (which comes first—good people or good law?). It has the happy effect of reorienting democratic theory: toward the material conditions of political practice, the unavoidable will of the people who are also always a multitude, and the not only regulative but also productive powers of law.

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ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 101 , Issue 1 , February 2007 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
© 2007 by the American Political Science Association

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