Excerpt

"Much of Mr. Habermas's analysis turns on an exploration of two accounts of democracy, which he labels ''liberal'' and ''civic republican.'' Under the liberal account, rooted in the work of Thomas Hobbes, politics is a process of bargaining, a matter of aggregating private interests. Liberals define citizens as holders of negative rights against the state. In the liberal view, politics is a struggle among interest groups for position and power.

The civic republican account, rooted in Aristotle and Rousseau, is very different: politics is not a mere matter of protecting our selfish interests but instead an effort to choose and implement our shared ideals. Civic republicans see rights not as negative constraints on government, but as promoting participation in political practices through which citizens become authors of their own community. Consider the right to free speech and the right to vote. For civic republicans, politics is a matter of discussion and self-legislation, in which people participate not in bargaining and compromise but in forms of reflection and talk.

The organizing theme of the book is Habermas's rejection of both views and his effort to defend instead what he calls ''deliberative politics'' or deliberative democracy.'' This is emphatically a procedural ideal. It is intended to give form to the notion of an ideal speech situation. Like civic republicans, deliberative democrats place a high premium on reason-giving in the public domain. But like liberals, they favor a firm boundary between the state and the society, and they insist on a robust set of constraints on what the government can do. Mr. Habermas sees majority rule not as a mere statistical affair, an effort to tally up votes, but instead as a large social process by which people discuss matters, understand one another, try to persuade each other and modify their views to meet counterarguments. In this way we form our beliefs and even our desires.

The deliberative conception of democracy anchors Mr. Habermas's theory of political legitimacy. For him, democracy does not exist to secure rights with which we have been endowed by our Creator; nor is it simply a way to allow us to throw the rascals out; nor is it a mechanism for processes of accommodation, compromise and the exercise of power. Democracy, ideally conceived, is a process by which people do not implement their preferences but consult and deliberate about what values and what options are best''.

Cass R. Sunstein