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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Communication is a crucial issue in our complex societies tinted by distrust. It is the core of democratic life and almost all human and social actions. Therefore it is essential for communication to be responsible. But responsible communication cannot only be conceived as a deontological issue, framed by ethical compliance requirements or good practices promotion. It should be considered with all the virtualities of communication, from conversation to consideration, going through narrative, interpretation and argumentation. Indeed each of these communicational capacities has its properties, assets, complementarities and limitations. They constitute different ways to be responsive. This book offers a contribution to the debate of Theory of Deliberative Theory (TDD), reexamined here within its different inspiration sources, notably the opposition between communicational turn and system, the fact of moral pluralism and the public reason.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: As Many Critiques As There Are Deliberations
1: From Defiant Critical Citizenship to Pluralist Political Critique
1.1. Testing critical citizenship
1.2. Critique as defiance
1.3. Stealth democracy versus sunshine democracy
1.4. From reactive critique to pluralist political critique
1.5. The critique of common sense
1.6. Intensity of critique towards democracy and propensity to engage
1.7. Comparative attractiveness of five features of democracy
1.8. From critical citizenship to citizenship critique
1.9. An unusual debate to tame the critics
2: Multiple and Conflicting Origins of Deliberative Democracy
2.1. Recent and deflationary definition of deliberative democracy
2.2. The sources of deliberative democracy
2.3. Questionable developments, remaining problems and the promise of theory
2.4. TDD from three other perspectives
2.5. Contested deliberation and probation
Part 2: Disseminated Deliberation between Empirical Analyses and Theoretical Disputes
3: Deliberation, Argumentation, Multiscale Agreement Modes
3.1. Fragmented deliberations under institutional constraints
3.2. Access to the agreements
3.3. Philosophy and practical deliberations
3.4. Guaranteed or “unfiltered” deliberation?
4: More than a “Familial Dispute” at the Foundation of Deliberative Democracy
4.1. Between Rawls and Habermas, incompatible perspectives
4.2. Disagreements at the heart of deliberative tools: reflective equilibrium and argumentation
4.3. Challenges of pluralism and limits of reflective equilibrium
4.4. Reflective equilibriums put to the test
4.5. The law at the risk of democratic debate
Part 3: Embodied Rhetoric and Complex Political System
5: Argumentation Put Into Question
5.1. Argumentation, the key to saving communicative rationality
5.2. Enigmatic Habermasian additions on argumentation
5.3. Expectations and disappointed promises of argumentative hopes
5.4. Give up?
5.5. Venturing out as the situation requires
5.6. Types of questions and components of the argument .
5.7. The frameworks of argumentation
5.8. Arguing, from law to politics
5.9. Argumentation, legal methodology, social justice
6: From Conversation to Consideration
6.1. Communication capacities
6.2. Conversation
6.3. Consideration
6.4. Issues, circumstances and responsibilities
6.5. Rhetoric, as essence and perfection of language
6.6. System of deliberative systems
6.7. Deliberative stage system and expertise
Conclusion: From Critique to Judgment “All Things Considered”
References
Index
Other titles from ISTE in Interdisciplinarity, Science and Humanities
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1. Type of commitment and intensity of critique of d...
Table 1.2. Attractiveness of definitions (theories) of democ...
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Conclusion: From Critique to Judgment “All Things Considered”
References
Index
Other titles from ISTE in Interdisciplinarity, Science and Humanities
End User License Agreement
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In memoriam
Jürg Steiner
driven by the urgencyof democratic issuesin the choice of his objects of research
Innovation and Responsibility Set
coordinated by
Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber
Volume 10
Responsible Deliberation, between Conversation and Consideration
Conditions for a Great Democratic Debate
Bernard Reber
First published 2023 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2023The rights of Bernard Reber to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s), contributor(s) or editor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ISTE Group.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933900
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA CIP record for this book is available from the British LibraryISBN 978-1-78630-172-7
Preface
While several books in both the Responsible Innovation and Innovation & Responsibility series mainly address the fields of innovation and research, this book focuses on the field of politics. Under what conditions can we speak of democratic innovation (Reber 2020a)? What are the conditions for a satisfactory democratic debate at normative and practical levels? This philosophical work thoroughly examines the normative conditions of democracy through the lens of the debates sparked by the most prolific theory, that of deliberative democracy. It discusses, among other things, the contributions of those who are recognized as its founders, Rawls and Habermas, in order to show their disagreements and the limits of the solutions they propose. Moreover, there is insistence on the fact that these theorists do not believe that their work can offer the guarantees for real debates between individuals. They speak respectively of conjecture and fiction. While many analyses claim to be about deliberation and evaluating it, and while deliberative experiments in mini-publics are growing exponentially, we must be aware of indicated and unresolved problems in order to be able to choose the relevant conditions for a good debate.
The term “democratic” is preferred to “citizen”. Indeed, qualifying these as “citizen” debates implies the disposition of virtues that others would not have or could have lost. Moreover, the elected officials, decision-makers and experts invited to these debates are also citizens. While their responsibilities are different, the quality of the term citizen must not be taken away from them. “democratic” indicates above all the way of justifying and conducting these debates and their inclusion in a larger democratic system. We could even call it a system of systems, where deliberation should be expected within and between all the discussion scenes.
Finally, the book presents the conditions of three very large-scale debates that were recently conducted in a large democracy, in France: the Grand débat national(Great National Debate); the Convention citoyenne pour le climat (Citizens’ Convention for the Climate) and the debate of a very large region, the Convention citoyenne pour l’Occitanie (Citizens’ Convention for Occitania). The conditions for implementing these debates are not only normative but also contextual. All three dealt with a problem that affects all of the countries in the world: the ecological transition is required to fight global warming.
In particular, this book discusses the attempts to increase citizen participation in political life, especially in political deliberations. Participation and inclusion are certainly the components of responsible research and innovation (RRI). While participation is not well articulated, it needs to be complemented by deliberation in order to hold together the RRI requirements of gender equality, science education, open science, ethics and governance. Yet, both the type of deliberation, as it has been thought of in the research community working on RRI, and the older one specialized around the theory of deliberative democracy (TDD) have evolved in parallel (Reber 2018a). Different meanings have even been given to the notion of deliberation. This book establishes this connection (Pellé and Reber 2015b). We wish to address the weaknesses of deliberation, as it has been understood in texts from the RRI-oriented community. Conversely, it indicates that the TDD would benefit from taking advantage of the concern to include responsibility in deliberation, so that it does not remain as just a discussion in view of a decision. Often, the notion of responsibility, in its various meanings, is absent from reflection in the political domain (Rosanvallon 2015), where, however, the entanglement of responsibilities is omnipresent (Bovens et al. 2014), whether for institutionally distributed responsibilities or in the very way in which those elected or chosen carry them out. Many of the problems concerning trust and distrust in politics have something to do with accountability. It is often through criticism that the responsibility of others is called into question. Yet the call to “answer for” is often overwhelmed by criticism, in its primary and reactive form of negative sanction, without developed judgment or justification.
In order to consider different forms of questioning and criticism, the “answer for”, making our responsibility explicit, can find its place within frameworks such as conversation, deliberation and/or consideration, mobilizing communicative capacities, ranging from questions to arguments.
The links between communication and accountability are of great importance for democratic life. They take the form of increasing demands for participation or deliberation claimed as innovative, or new demands on democracy. However, many theoretical problems remain, which neither Rawls nor Habermas have solved, despite being recognized as founders of the TDD (Bächtiger et al. 2018; Chambers 2018; Floridia 2018). The confrontation between these two authors is revisited here in detail, as well as their often reckless or even erroneous translations for empirical work, which neither of them encourage by any means. It is therefore necessary to revisit and take the deliberation further in order to better ground it and to be able to carry out more coherent empirical work. We should not shelter under their misunderstood authority. On the contrary, it is advisable to favor a more experimental and pragmatic logic, and at the same time learn from these trials without rushing too quickly towards these or those which form institutionalization. Simultaneously maintaining both informed philosophy and socio-political experience is one of the challenges of this book. It discusses the different types of research programs at the intersection of philosophy and social and political sciences.
The communication associated with deliberation does not simply aim for a description of the world, individual expressions of impressions or feelings: it must make it possible to express expectations, judge, change and commit to doing so. Beyond the respect of the participants in the debate, communication is constructed thanks to an order of discourse, largely inherited from rhetoric. This order, if neglected, contributes to the chaos of the world and the disorder of its future. Narration, interpretation and argumentation organize this order of discourse differently. It is not only a question of “narrative warfare”, a popular expression today and presented wrongly as a discovery. These communicative capacities help in the coordination and risk-taking of conversation, in the expression of disagreements and uncertainties, or in the careful investigation of deliberation. These abilities in the case of consideration take care of both the partners in the discussion and all the dimensions of the examination that need to be taken into account. The conceptual richness of consideration brings together levels of communication and reflection, individual and collective. This book insists on this promise, which is the other side of resentment or defiant criticism, which threatens collective life in our complex and pluralistic societies. Indeed, consideration creates trust, which is essential for all collective actions, between individuals and towards institutions, whether facing challenges, such as during a pandemic, or in the fight against global warming. While criticism has its place in a democracy, not all types of criticism have a place. It can be weak in form, content and the very way it addresses others, as well as in the complexity of the issues and the pluralism of the criticisms that it takes into account or not, for “all things considered” type judgments.
Now, it is indeed the criticism that is indirectly at the heart of the burdens of judgment in Rawls, which forces us to recognize what he calls the fact of reasonable pluralism. Habermas, on the contrary, defends a rational criticism ultimately based on arguments, which makes this criticism escape from relativism. Now, in this book, we analyze this discrepancy carefully: while Rawls’ and Habermas’ solutions are not convincing, they point to real problems unthought of by those involved. Both point in directions deserving of attention.
Thus, the confrontation with double pluralism, that of knowledge and that of ethics, which began in Precautionary Principle, Pluralism and Deliberation (Reber 2016a), must be continued.
Throughout its many pages, this book looks back on an unusual experiment, undoubtedly a first in terms of a major democratic country: the Great National Debate which took place in France in the first part of 2019 in the wake of the so-called Yellow Vests crisis. This unusual debate was followed by an experiment: the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate (2019–2021). For 17 months, 150 randomly selected citizens participated at the heart of an experiment, which may have envied the supporters of the rapprochement between the RRI and deliberative democracy (Reber 2020a). A third experiment was inspired by the latter for the Citizens’ Convention for Occitania (2020). With these three cases, we leave behind the participative or deliberative experiments, which are certainly sometimes sophisticated, but which remain as confined as they are confidential. Above all, one of their major weaknesses is the lack of interest of political decision-makers, all powers included, who, for the most part, have ignored these experiments (Dryzek et al. 2019). Yet, the first two experiments were launched at the initiative of the President of the French Republic and the third at that of a regional president. This was probably the first time that a large and ancient democracy ventured into such an exercise on such a scale.
Internationally, such experiments are proliferating (OECD 2020)1. This has already been the case for other European conventions, such as What is your Europe?2 (2018), as well as the earlier Great French National Debate, and the Conference on the Future of Europe, which started in the fall of 20213. The latter intermingles national debates, citizens’ assemblies (four panels of 800 citizens picked at random) and hybrid plenary assemblies composed of delegates from the panels, other citizens (notably from the national debates), parliamentarians, other elected officials at other territorial levels, ministers and European commissioners.
The following chapters will exploit the theoretical advances proposed to better understand these experiments, which are of interest to all democracies, especially with regard to the challenge of using them to drive an ecological transition in the face of global warming, particularly concerning stakeholder inclusion in a spirit of social justice. Indeed, the question submitted to the French Citizens’ Convention for the Climate was worded as follows: “How can we reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, in a spirit of social justice?”
This book thus shows that the confined RRI experiments can inform broader political practices and, above all, contribute to the consideration of participation and deliberation on multiple scales. Deliberation across multiple scales can draw on the ancient resources of rhetoric, which are being rediscovered by political and cognitive psychology. Rhetoric has integrated the sum to be given to emotions, criticism, judgment and its suspension, all of which are useful for political life in open political societies. It has developed communicative resources, notably narrative, interpretative and argumentative, as institutions have become more complex. These resources can be deployed in conversation, the high place of orality and political participation, in deliberation, but more promisingly, in consideration, paying the expected amount of attention to people and to the examination of the issues being addressed at the same time.
Many of the debates that have punctuated the transition to deliberative democracy are therefore very peripheral to the difficulties of rational criticism and judgment, which are as monumental as they are decisive: the fate of judgment is linked to that of criticism, in order to reach “all things considered” type judgments. Criticism and judgment are consubstantial to modernity and democracy.
August 2023
Notes
1
For a very heterogeneous census, see the Participedia website, which has counted 1,724 experiments and 333 methods in 134 countries (as of March 11, 2021):
https://participedia.net/
[Accessed: March 11, 2021].
2
See:
https://ec.europa.eu/france/news/20180509_consultation_en_ligne_fr
.
3
See:
https://europa.eu/european-union/conference-future-europe_fr
.
Acknowledgments
Like any work, this book is interspersed by numerous readings and rereadings of other texts, mostly philosophical. Some of them have played an eminent role in the history of democracy. They also enable the analysis of it. They inspire new experiments that are supposed to bring to life some of the democratic promises, or more banally, to innovate. This book has therefore also benefited from the observation of certain large-scale experiments in participatory or even deliberative democracy. The reflections matured at length in this text have therefore benefited from more contemporary conversations from various backgrounds, academics, practitioners and people involved in these debates, putting citizens to the test of democratic requirements. I would like to thank them warmly. They are numerous and I cannot name them all. I would like to thank Kalli Giannelos, Virgil Cristian Lenoir and Isacco Turina for their careful review and suggestions. I would also like to thank my fellow researchers and observers of the French Great National Debate and the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the members of Missions publiques, including Yves Mathieu, the organizers of the Citizens’ Convention for Occitania, the Feedback Group of the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate of the Conseil économique social et environnemental (CESE), the Séminaire interdisciplinaire des recherches sur l’environnement de Sciences Po (AIRE), my laboratory (Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po, Cevipof), including Alexandre Escudier, Janie Pélabay, Réjane Sénac, Annabelle Lever, Alain Policar, Bruno Cautrès, Daniel Boy, Martial Foucault, Pascal Perrineau, Diego Antolinos-Basso, Flora Chanvril-Ligneel, Pierre-Henri Bono and Jean Chiche. Some parts of this book have been tested in more than 50 international conferences. I am particularly grateful to Emmanuelle Danblon, Robert Gianni, Philippe Bardy, Pierre Chiron, Cécile Blatrix, André Bächtiger, Félix Heidenreich, David Djaïz, Clément Tonon, Janie Mansbridge and Maia Rousiley, as well as to Philip Kitcher with whom I was able to co-lead the Alliance-Columbia University and Sciences Po project, Science-Based Policy and Democratic Deliberation.
Finally, I would like to thank the members of the Centre des politiques de la terre (Idex Université de Paris, ANR-18-IDEX-0001) and more particularly those of the project it supports and that I lead: Knowledge RESPONSIVENESS for Ecological Transition.
Introduction
“Mal nommer un objet c’est ajouter au malheur de ce monde” (translation) “To name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world”
The statement made famous by Albert Camus, who borrowed it from the philosopher Brice Parain1, allows me to point out one of the major problems addressed in this book. However, it is a question of taking a step further. It is not only the naming, the choices, and the uses of words that are at stake, but their ordering, the order of the discourse. If it is true that naming or defining can add to the misery of the world when it is not attentive and adjusted, it is even more true for the order of discourse. Moreover, it is not only about concrete objects. Indeed, for a good number of discourses, those that deal, for example, with future politics, or those whose objects are abstract – partially or totally, like justice or responsibility – different definitions, interpretations and ordering of discourses to name them, express them, share them and discuss them are possible. To put it succinctly, even though we have forgotten it, rhetoric, in its noblest and most demanding sense, has made it possible to elaborate and order the discourse. Its fate is linked to the vitality of politics and democracy.
Certainly, our time is more about small sentences and information flows, rather than constructed discourses. Tweeting (in French chatting, chirping, even blabbing) is not the same as arguing.
The order of the discourse can be as shimmering as music. Narration, interpretation, and argumentation, for example, organize discourse and communication in different ways. They help us to coordinate to converse, to express disagreements and uncertainties to deliberate, or investigate with attention, both to the partners in the discussion and to all the dimensions of the examination that need to be accounted for in the case of consideration. Conversations are most often bouncy and disjointed, moving quickly from one topic to another. However, they can be much more extended and focused on a subject. They can be more sustained, both for thematic coherence and for the attention given by each partner. Deliberations, when they have gone beyond respectful communicative exchanges, must be very structured, as it is a matter of deciding when disagreements and uncertainties exist. As for consideration, through its conceptual richness, we will see that it brings together levels, domains, and aspects of communication and reflection, both individual and collective, in an even richer way. Moreover, it is astonishing that until now it has not found its rightful place, notably in political life. This written work is a first step in this direction. It is more promising and complete than deliberation. It is one of the flip sides of consideration, resentment, which threatens collective life in our complex and pluralistic societies.
Thanks to Parain and Camus, we could therefore establish a link between them: the naming of objects, and, for us, the order of discourse and the misfortune or happiness of our common world. If we add to this the worlds to come, absent by definition and often abstract, which compose and decompose a good part of political life, the order of discourse is an even more essential issue. From this point of view, the reductive injunctions to “the concrete”, “real life” and “real people” would be deserving of oppositions and questionings. Indeed, a great part of what we rely on to change the world, our relationships with it and with humanity, concerns what has not yet happened and abstract concepts, supposed to guide us and, if it is necessary, pull us away from the present mediocrity. Freedom, responsibility, justice and even democracy are examples. I will add that the concept of the so-called “real people” who would live a “real life” is as problematic as it is insulting for others that these unjustified pretensions induce. Certainly, the living conditions and contexts of some are not those of others. The richness of communicative capacities allows us to precisely put these contexts into discussion so that the shared contexts of life can be woven together, even though it is not in an intersubjective way, by the means of institutions and systems.
The entire quotation from Camus indicates another side of the problem of responsible communication as a condition of responsible deliberation, as it is envisaged in this work: “Parain’s profound idea is an idea of honesty: the criticism of language cannot evade the fact that our words commit us and that we must be faithful to them” (author’s translation).
This book is not a treatise on how to communicate well and adopt good practices when it comes to communication, which would have been entitled: “How to communicate while being efficient and ethical”. It is not just about ethical compliance or a code of ethics for communicators. It goes beyond the question of the commitment of our word, along a Paraino-Camusian line, which, while useful, can be insufficient when it is rightly challenged. This is often the case when we must face the conflict between opposite commitments. Political life is paved with them.
Conversation, deliberation, consideration and communicational capacities for “responding to”
This book is first and foremost concerned with the capacity to “respond to” another way of talking about responsibility, but for all sorts of actions and not simply the commitment of our word. Now, this capacity to “respond to” can take on different frameworks. It can be a conversation. This is the term used, for example, by the moral philosopher McKenna (2012), who links responsibility and conversation. He acknowledges that Watson (1987) inspired this connection between responsibility and conversation.
However, “responding to” can find its place in a deliberation, whether it is individual, silent or exposed to the risk of collective deliberation. It should be noted that theories of deliberative democracy pay little attention to the tension between individual and collective deliberation (Reber 2011e). As for the responsibilities involved, which can be imputed into the different participants in a deliberation, to my knowledge, they have never been discussed.
This is also the case for the responsibilities of the institutions of our complex, networked and constrained democracies, which must be considered in any deliberation.
The deliberating parties are affected by different responsibilities. Deliberation is thus at work in the minds of participants in a reflection and in their exchanges, within the micro-institutions that structure them, and as a macro- and inter-institutional deliberative system. Depending on the time it is given and its form, it can be more or less effective for “responding to”.
Finally, responsibility could find a place within another framework, that of consideration. I will therefore propose a new theory of democracy, alongside the already famous one of deliberation, that of the considerative democracy to use an old term, or giving consideration, or simply of the democracy of consideration. The democracy of consideration is oriented by the consideration of the persons conversing or deliberating, as well as the examination “all things considered” of common but different systems of responsibilities. Conversation deepens, consideration allows for both deepening, through attention to a dimension for further consideration or to a person, and broadening.
In each of its three frameworks, responsibility understood as “responding to” can rely on different communicative capacities. It can take the form of a narrative, interpretation or argument, but these communicative capacities are not exhaustive. Each one has its advantages and limitations. We will often have to improvise, because human life is not a theater where the replies are written. However, these improvisations, as in music, require the integration of a minimum of certain codes2. I would like to add that we will have to deal with more or less good improvisations. In the same way, we will often have to implement a translation. The use of analogies is also very frequent in exchanges to understand, be understood, and compare situations and solutions (Hofstadter and Sander 2013).
However, in the rules of public debate, it is often only the appeal to the arguments that is required. But this choice is arbitrary. Why close the door to other communicative capacities (Reber 2007)? Moreover, argumentation is underdetermined when it is not made explicit at all. I will therefore question argumentation, in the sense that I will pose and attempt to respond to unthinking questions about this communicative and rhetorical resource that is much more required than presented. Moreover, it sometimes offers several response options. This is not only the problem of those who propose public deliberation, of practitioners, but also of most deliberation theorists, and even, as we will see in detail, of one of the most authoritative references on deliberation: Jürgen Habermas (Reber 2011b, 2020b). He demands argumentation, but the developments he gives us are insufficient and problematic, even though his work does not wait for their implementation in real experiments.
However, the most important thing is that by demanding argumentation, we go much too fast. The types of questions asked and the possible responses are just as important, in order to understand each other, before being able to agree. If conflict is related to politics (Simmel 2013), should we not first be able to make ourselves understood before arguing our disagreements? This is even more true with participatory experiments where citizens are drawn at random to participate in conventions over several weekends (Reber 2020a). The time taken to understand each other is just as long and important as the time taken to discuss disagreements or even to develop agreements. One of the discoveries from careful observation of so-called participatory debates, which are deliberative, such as the Great French National Debate, is that individuals sometimes do not have an opinion, but above all, they do not like to display their disagreements in public and, a fortiori, are very embarrassed when it comes to justifying their points of view.
However, the ancient resources of rhetoric have taken care of these difficulties with the part to be given to emotions, criticism, judgment and its suspension, all of which are useful for political life in open political societies. The politician, as envisaged by Aristotle, has developed communicative resources as institutions have become more complex. Works ranging from psychology to cognitive science to anthropology are restoring plausibility and its nobility to rhetoric when they do not rediscover it (Danblon 2013).
The frameworks of conversation, deliberation and consideration that are more or less close to one or another in terms of communicative capacities, ranging from questions to argumentation, must therefore be able to consider different forms of questioning and criticism. Indeed, it is the path of criticism that is taken by the questioning of the responsibility of others. In this case, the call to “respond to” is often crushed by criticism, which is a negative sanction, often issued without trial: a sanction without developed judgment or justification. However, in the first chapter we will see several forms of criticism that call for increasingly sophisticated reflexive capacities, depending on how well they handle the complexity of problems, the ability to respond to them, but above all because they are hospitable to opposing criticisms through the recognition of pluralism.
This is similar to simple interindividual interactions, where X questions the responsibility of Y, who defends themself. In the course of their conversation, which is sometimes imprecise and disjointed, they can even take turns being accused and accusing. They go through the deliberation process in light of uncertainties and various conflicts. They can also come to consider the problems that are discussed differently, changing the types of considerations and granting more time to a careful examination, to come to consider themselves differently or to make an “all things considered” judgment. With these last three terms, we will recognize three meanings of consideration: 1) types of motives, even of discipline; 2) careful examination and 3) attention to someone. All of this will be developed in Chapter 6.
This sequence is not a description of the steps that should be taken in any discussion where responsibilities are involved. It is only intended to give a sense of the link between these frameworks and what they each allow for themselves. It explains the choice of the title of this work and its economy.
Concentrating on the admittedly immense problem of responsibility has the advantage of not lending itself to the overly comfortable communication that comes out of nowhere, is not anchored and contextualized, and is not attached to any agent, even an institutional one. A discussion without constraint, even though desirable, especially if these constraints are the intimidating force, is not desirable if no one is responsible for anything. Indeed, responsibility is attached to any action. Often, in law for example, it is past actions that are called into question (Ricœur 1995). These are actions that have caused damage, which must be repaired. But it is also future actions that can be involved, with contracts for example.
More practically, the advantage of the solidarity between action and responsibility is to be able to escape the criticism expressed in the popular form: “It’s all about communication.” It must be understood that nothing will be done and that what is said is not followed by action, when it is not cynicism.
The link between communication and responsibility is of great importance for democratic life. The demands for participation or deliberation that are flourishing, innovative forms or new demands on democracy, require communication. All it takes is for a political problem to arise for debates to spring up everywhere like mushrooms. This is the case for the European conventions that had already occurred before the Great French National Debate, and for the larger ones that began in the fall of 2021. At the international level, these experiments are proliferating (OECD 2020)3. Specialists in deliberation are arguing for a broader adoption of this approach (Dryzek et al. 2019). However, communication is not simply about describing the world or individual expressions of impressions or feelings; it must allow for expectations to be expressed, judgments, changes and commitments to be made.
Civic technology and its use in debates
It is fashionable to participate, whether in person or via dedicated platforms called civic technology, or “civic techs”, literally technologies for citizenship, or, to put it more modestly, technologies that enable the expression of sometimes very large numbers of participants. This subtitle, like the advertisements that mention “price to be debated”, plays on the fact that they can allow for debate, but that the very way in which they can envisage it deserves debate. Indeed, these platforms often gather more or less structured exchanges and conversations between citizens. However, if the modes of participation are numerous and very different, very quickly questions arise in modern democracies with large populations where the participation of all of those present in person is simply not possible. It is true that information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide widespread access to participation, and even to the expression of individuals, but here too, communicational exchanges clash with certain limits. We cannot read nor even respond to everything. Certainly, algorithms can structure parts of conversations or, more often, chatter but some of this will escape what a real time conversation in a shared space would allow. Broad participation and deep communication are therefore, to some extent, antagonistic.
This is how voting circumvents this difficulty, opting for the participation of the great number, but reducing communication to very little, because we only express a single voice, either on a subject in the case of an initiative and a referendum, or to choose such or such candidate from a more or less limited offering according to the voting methods and the comparative importance of the parties. We say, “to give one’s voice”. However, in this situation, the voice, although it is a singular marker, is homogenized, it loses its timbre; all the voices are equal. Above all, this voice as an expression of a suffrage stops at the threshold of communication.
Moreover, the ICTs and polling booths share a form of segregation, isolation from the rest of the world. Indeed, the Internet user is alone in front of their screen, which also grants a time and sometimes very limited attention to question, sanction or respond. They will sometimes want to exaggerate their words as if to lift the curse or simply the constraint of distance. They escape the questioning and reasoning, even the pressures of real and participatory discussion. Among these are the emotions expressed on faces. The rise of emoticons, more and more numerously, is also significant in this need to associate messages and emotions or feelings, a rhetoric which has been known for a long time (Aristotle 2009; Danblon 2013).
Certainly, technology is always ambivalent (Chardel and Reber 2011; Chardel et al. 2012). It can be argued that, on the contrary, the screen can give access to opinions that a face-to-face discussion would not have allowed, as well as to potentially infinite information. In any case, most civic tech-type platforms do not open up, by far, to all communicative capacities. Certainly, the transition to experiments supported by technologies, in this case digital, has the advantage of requiring the clarification of what we wish to do and the associated functions. These choices are part of institutional design. If these choices are fixed and “inscribed” in the technical possibilities, the uses that will be made of them will not be determined. They anticipate real uses that must be analyzed. The analysis will have to be comparative in order to see the differences between face-to-face or remote exchanges.
In both cases, the problems of time and attention will be essential. If techniques erase distances, they do not reduce the time of attention necessary for a rich and attentive communication. Attention, when it is given – and not just the voice – is a component of consideration. The real presence is not always real. Without summoning the whole phenomenological tradition that has been able to grasp the breadth of the present and to take temporality seriously, we understand very quickly that presence and attention are variable, diverted by the flow of information. There is therefore a lot of absence in civic techs.
We can, however, wonder if these debates, whether at a distance or in real presence, are up to our expectations. To know this, we need to have an idea of “how to debate” and “how to speak”. To participate for what purpose, with whom, according to what selections, by drawing lots, but above all according to what rules? It is more the question of “how” to participate than the question of “why”.
Deliberation is not just participation. It already answers the questions of “why” and “how” to participate at whatever level and whatever the assembly and its relationship with other institutions.
This book therefore analyzes the main inspirations of the theory of deliberative democracy (TDD), and its unexplored and problematic points. If many experiments have been tried, which make it possible to better understand how deliberation develops, what are the conditions that favor it or, on the contrary, restrict it? It is necessary to take the theoretical divergences between those who have contributed to it and to whom we refer to as an authority seriously. This concerns Rawls and Habermas in particular, whom we associate too hastily. Indeed, they diverge on the crucial problems of judgment, rational criticism and communicative capacities. While some deliberativists have placed them in the same family of thought, lazily summing up their differences as a family feud, we will see that they are often far apart, and even more surprisingly, that they do not understand each other, nor do they succeed in convincing each other (Chapter 4).
Levels of criticism according to issues and communicational capacities
The convinced participationists do not question the interest, the will, the availability or even the competences of citizens to enter into regulated discussions within groups marked by diversity and often favoring, if not pluralism, then at least a plurality of opinions on the same problems. However, a good number of studies in quantitative political science are more than skeptical about the citizen’s desire to participate. On the contrary, what they call “critical citizenship” is a defiance, even a form of cynicism towards democracy. Some pollsters even speak of “prafism…” for “nothing to do (or screw) with politics” (Teinturier 2017). In France, they would be close to 33%.
However, we can imagine that this form of criticism is only a tiny part of it, as unsound and unsupported as it is tenacious, often not taking pluralism into account. Criticism has many other aspects. It is even at the heart of the modern project. Let us think about the Kantian criticism, of the democratic project, even of the organization of the discourse of the whole philosophy since its advent. Some Socratic questions in the Platonic dialogues are often implicit critiques. Democratic institutions, through their laws and their different systems, the free media, favor criticism and pluralism, often better than the individuals themselves (Habermas 1996). This is also true for theories that justify different poles of legitimacy of democracy (Cunningham 2002). The latter is often a source of disappointment because it is the only system that accepts its own self-criticism. This self-criticism is even inspired and guaranteed by democratic promises (Innerarity 2020).
We will show in this written work that the aspiration to participation exists, but above all that criticism can take different forms. We will thus proceed to the first in-depth analysis, that of the forms of criticism. We will also see what makes the democratic ideal features attractive going from the democracy of the experts to the right to contest, without forgetting deliberation. We will rely on a survey (Chapter 1). The whole problem is that of the conditions of the critique and of the envisaged solutions. We will have to explore the distinctions and the path that goes from criticism to pluralistic critical rationality. Pluralism obliges us, contrary to the universalism of the Enlightenment, to consider this requirement at all levels, not only that of politics, but also those of ethics and science. It is then necessary to consider the requirements of pluralism of knowledge and moral pluralism (Reber 2013, 2016a, 2016b). The latter mobilizes all the critical attention at the heart of the difficulties of judgment in Rawls, sources of the fact of reasonable pluralism, while Habermas believes that a rational criticism is possible. We will see that Rawls’ and Habermas’ solutions are not convincing (Chapters 4 and 5).
More fundamentally, the proponents of deliberative democracy, while recognizing the important role played by these major authors in the development of this theory, sometimes as mere legitimation or argument from authority, do not revisit the possibilities – or, on the contrary, the impossibilities – of rational criticism. Habermas goes in the first direction, that of possibility without being convincing, and Rawls stumbles on the difficulty of judgment. The second generation of deliberativists (Bächtiger et al. 2018) has taken the view that these authors are to be lumped together. Not only is this wrong if we were to read them, but even more so if we were to let them explain themselves, as we are fortunate that a dialogue (Habermas 1995, 1998; Rawls 1995) took place between them (Chapters 2–4). Returning to these unresolved issues is not for pleasure for an exegete or a careful reader, but a discussion that is necessary at the normative level of philosophy and even more vital for the institutional design choices of all the forms of participation or deliberation that seem to be imposed today4. The expected quality must be demanded as much for the instituted deliberation places of our democracies, composed of elected officials, as for the new experiments, often selecting citizens drawn at random. More experimental, these latter experiments sometimes intend to do better than the former, according to a strong version, to complete according to a more moderate version, or even to allow for a continuous democracy and the realization of constitutional promises, for example for France (Rousseau 2020): “Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its [the law’s] foundation” (Article 6 of the Declaration of 1789).
Many of the debates that have punctuated the transition to a deliberative democracy are therefore very peripheral to these difficulties of rational criticism and judgment, which are as monumental as they are decisive: the fate of judgment is linked to that of critique. Both are consubstantial to modernity5 and democracy.
These problems must be taken into account if we claim to be following Rawls and Habermas in order to justify or venture into experiments with ordinary citizens gathered in mini-publics, which neither of them envisaged. They even think that they are hardly possible, if not impossible (Reber 2020a). However, there is nothing to prevent us from attempting participatory or deliberative experiments in mini-publics, or in much more extensive ones, like the Great National Debate. It will then be necessary to see how the warnings of these powerful authors and the problems they point out can be dealt with. We should not take shelter under their misunderstood authority but, on the contrary, in a more experimental and pragmatic logic, learn from these essays without rushing too quickly towards this or that form of institutionalization. Maintaining philosophy and socio-political experience together is in any case one of the arguments of this book, in which different types of research programs between these disciplines are discussed (Chapter 3).
In my previous written works, I have already shed light on some of these difficulties. I have answered these philosophical problems in Precautionary Principle, Pluralism, Deliberation. Science and Ethics (Reber 2016a). In La démocratie génétiquement modifiée. Sociologies éthiques de l’évaluation des technologies controversées (Reber 2011c), I have shown what is good and just; ethics is very diversely assessed. Similarly, I have indicated that the criteria for the quality of a good debate are essentially oriented (Reber 2005a) towards approaches that focus on the quality of interactions between participants and very little on – or sometimes to the detriment of – the quality of the content of their exchanges.
Here I will make a second in-depth analysis, that of the types of expected communicational capacities. Participants are often required to provide arguments. Paradoxically, as much as this requirement is asserted, it is never defined. This is worse than William Blake’s undue demand to extort arguments6 (Stengers 1997, p. 93; Reber 2005b). Moreover, this ability must be balanced with other communicative abilities (Reber 2007).
A third in-depth analysis, a more upstream approach, questions the presuppositions that seem to be self-evident. Which questions are asked that are different for different participants, communicative capacities, types of argumentation (according to the contexts) and considerations (Chapter 6)? Indeed, these questions can be general to fix the circumstances and the context, known since Quintilian with his hexameter7. We have even found them in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. They are still used in law, journalism, literature, and also in the narratives of our conversations, even if implicitly. These seven questions are: Who? What? Where? When? How? How much? Why? The answer to these questions establishes the context! The sequence of these questions is crucial for establishing responsibilities, whether legal, political or moral. In the same way, if joint drafting of texts is expected from deliberative democracy experiments, these components participate not only in giving it order, but also in conducting the investigation.
The questions dealt with in this book – even if they are sometimes abstract in their treatment because of the importance of the theoretical and normative problems that are imposed, and if they sometimes look for solutions very far back in time and whose relevance questions the half-certainties repeated in contemporary political science – have practical implications of the first order. It is the urgency of certain situations that requires a reflection that questions false solutions or superficial, vague or over-hasty innovations. The “whys” of participation and the justifications for its implementation often only have silence as a response.
Deliberation between philosophy and experiments
This book of philosophy is primarily concerned with political theory. It discusses the blind spots in the TDD, which is ill-founded, as those who are considered to be the purveyors or guarantors of its foundation, Rawls and Habermas, do not agree with each other (Chapter 4). Then, it highlights the unthinkable aspects of this theory, notably its communicative and rhetorical requirements. It proposes, if not an overcoming of, the necessary complements with conversation, on the one hand, and consideration, on the other hand, capable of doing justice to the ways in which we talk to each other and to the need for deliberative systems within which deliberations in assembly find their place. But this book wishes to offer the reader more. Indeed, neither Rawls nor Habermas propose to use their theories for empirical work; far from it, and may it displease those who use them as sureties. These authors are even severe about these possibilities of intersubjective deliberations. Both of them even claim a great humility about the contribution of philosophy to democratic life (Chapters 3 and 5). This book highlights these differences and the problems that still need to be solved at a theoretical level, in order to take into account the warnings of these two authors and the limits of the solutions they defend. These theoretical clarifications should encourage inspiration for a more informed TDD and for experiments that would claim to be based on it, avoiding as many misinterpretations as possible. However, it does not stop there. It invites us to not be afraid of these difficulties, but to act with full knowledge of the facts. Indeed, the social demand for more deliberation is exponential, with the most varied audiences. With a lack of knowledge of these theoretical debates, the political offers are also ever more numerous, as if mentioning the term “deliberation” with unusual audiences of “citizens” were the only legitimacy. This book also aims to be original in its use of recent socio-political experiments of unprecedented scope. It is mainly about the two steps, united but very different, which are the Great National Debate ((2019), which I will abbreviate to GND) and the Citizens’ Convention on Climate ((2019–2021), which I will abbreviate to C3). A third experience, the Citizens’ Convention for Occitania (2020), in the first European region to have discussed the European Green Deal with this kind of heterogeneous audience, will be briefly mentioned.
Of course, philosophy does not need experiments, but when such events are wanted by governments, why not accompany theoretical reflection with experiments? Indeed, even though empirical proof cannot replace theoretical justifications, it is interesting to evoke these cases, in order to present certain characteristics and to consider them. It is true that these complex devices, themselves objects of controversy, were not conceived as research experiments. The philosopher’s or any researcher–observer’s position that is embedded in the analysis of these experiments is thus lateral. They have not defined the design and therefore remain independent from the organization. This posture complements the various approaches to experiments and/or analyses of deliberation that we will discuss in Chapters 2 and 3, which are also lateral, in an original way. Moreover, a careful examination allows for a discussion in light of theoretical debates, mainly on deliberation, conversation or consideration. Consideration still does not find much place in this debate. It is sometimes even an opportunity to reconsider theoretical proposals. This detour through experience makes it possible to test the plausibility of certain theoretical propositions, in order to provide resources for the analysis of points that social science research mostly leaves aside (Reber 2011a, 2011c), and, more interestingly, to question presuppositions and things taken for granted that are not at all self-evident in the reality of experience.
In a very succinct form, in just a few pages, such a consideration of these experiments concludes each chapter, accompanied by references for much more detailed studies. These pages hope to have found the right balance between a minimal description to understand what it is all about and some elements of analysis that echo the much more numerous theoretical discussions within the chapters. This choice was made, on the one hand, because multidisciplinary publications exist, and, on the other hand, because these additions at the end of the chapters are only a few pages long. Having been able to devote two years to the observation and collective analysis of these experiments, I will thus exploit the first analyses of these experiments in light of theoretical questions in the course of the chapters, but with the concern of a return to these theories. I will thus produce a normative analysis at the theoretical level, and also provide a discussion between theory and some empirical results (Chapter 3).
At the heart of these three wide-ranging debates, distributed over several steps, were two problems that are not specifically French: on the one hand, democracy and its worrying evolution, and on the other, the ecological transition.
It all began in France with a crisis symptomatic of the difficulties inherent in the ecological transition and criticism. This so-called Yellow Vests crisis began in November 2018. However, it is a symptom of the two other crises presented just now: democracy and global warming, requiring an ecological transition that comes at the price of radical changes in individual and collective behavior, affecting all areas and to be thought through over several decades. We could even talk about conversions. Moreover, the second of these crises, the climate crisis, is a challenge for democracy. Some people would like us to listen only to the experts, those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for example, to deduce policies from their warnings that would dispense with democratic debate. Much more modest and far from this form of epistemocracy or powers abandoned to experts alone for political decisions, the decision of the French government to increase the tax on diesel (increasing by 6.5 cents per liter) and gasoline (passing 2.9 cents per liter more) has unknowingly caused this Yellow Vests8 movement. This increase was then blocked, with a loss of revenue for the state ranging between four and six billion euros. Of course, this reaction can be understood more broadly as the expression of being fed up with taxes. Thanks to the capabilities of social networks, mainly Facebook, the Yellow Vests have been widely mobilized throughout the territory to oppose this increase in the domestic consumption tax on energy products. This tax concerns fuels9 in particular, and more particularly diesel, which had to approach a higher price than gasoline, as is the case in several countries of the European Union. Because of this crisis, the planned increases in this tax have been cancelled for 2019–2022. These heterogeneous groups have carried claims, which were also, passing from purchasing power to a referendum of citizen’s initiative (abbreviated as RIC in French), expressed in various ways, allowing them to remove elected officials, for example. Ecological transition wanted faster movement on the government side, via the regular increase of a carbon tax, and modification of democracy, desired to be more direct on the part of the Yellow Vests: we find the two subjects at the heart of these crises. The Yellow Vests crisis began with the increase of a carbon tax. The C3 ended, at least for its first official sequence (with the handing over to the Head of State in June 2020), with a 460-page text, composed of 149 measures grouped in families, with a large number of them accompanied by legistic transcriptions, as well as proposals for the modification of the Constitution to be submitted to a referendum, all of this in order to accelerate the ecological transition. It should be noted that the carbon tax on fuels passed on to consumers is evaded. This problem remains.
Democratic discussion of policy issues has thus not remained confined to the usual forums or to the heart of researchers’ and practitioners’ experiments, which are often sophisticated but little known and have tenuous impacts (Dryzek et al. 2019). If this article was for a wide audience, submitted by mainly English specialists, published in Nature, called “to bring (deliberative moments) in from the margins and make them a more familiar part of standard political practice” (p. 1146), we must recognize that this step has been taken with these large-scale French experiments. Other international experiments, such as the Conference on the Future of Europe, have recently concluded (April 2021–May 2022) with, among other things, an environment and health axis. It is true that the road from democratic discussion to real deliberation is still long, not only for practices, but for most theorists (Reber 2011a, 2020a).
The experiments chosen here are fully inscribed in the socio-political field and enjoy a high public and international visibility. Of course, the political personnel who were in charge of its implementation and the facilitators, often from private companies, have normative ideas about the appropriate frameworks for proposing, conducting and restituting this kind of participatory, even deliberative, exercise, which is novel in some aspects. Yet they do not always agree, and the definition of these frameworks is an object of study in itself.
This book therefore draws on these recent experiments10. The GND has included more than 10,000 local initiative meetings with an average attendance of about 60 people. The second, at the initiative11 of the President of the French Republic, allowed 150 citizens chosen at random to elaborate 149 measures in 17 months, with a promise from the executive to transmit them “without filters” to the various institutional decision-making channels provided for in the Constitution.
While many of the experiments that have come out of research projects or what is a matter of local democracy (Morio 2020) have had little impact and are sometimes unknown to political leaders, no one among them can say that they have not heard of the GND or C3 up to the highest level of decision-making. Moreover, the mission of organizing the GND has been devolved to two members of the government, the Minister of Social and Territorial Cohesion and the Secretary of State to the Minister Ecological and Solidarity Transition. As for C3, 20% of French people have heard of it12.
Until now, these participatory or deliberative experiments have rarely received the publicity that their novelty and, above all, what we could learn from them for democratic life and its improvement deserved. Who has heard of an experiment like World Wide Views13? Yet it brought together more than 10,000 citizens from 76 countries on a subject as important as the fight against global warming in preparation for the COP21 in 2015. Who has heard of the many citizens’ conventions in European countries (Gomez-Bassac and Herbillon 2017)? Certainly, cases such as the assemblies in Ireland, the drafting of a constitution – not implemented – in Iceland, or even the cases of citizen participation in Oregon or, more unknown, in Alberta14, have given more visibility to participatory experiments. There is even talk of a deliberative “wave” (OECD 2020).
