Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

Habermas and the Ideal of Agreement
In contrast, Habermas’s theory begins from much more open and pluralistic terrain. In 
particular, Habermas does not construct a sharp separation between public reasoning and private 
comprehensive doctrines thus leaving more open to political debate and contestation. For 
instance, Benhabib (1996, 76) contends that, in contrast to Rawls, the Habermasian…
…deliberative model does not restrict the agenda of public conversation; in fact it 
encourages discourse about the lines separating the public from the private; [and] 
second the deliberative model locates the public sphere in civil society, and is 
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Indeed, being neutral toward conceptions of the good – or, at least, contending that it is desirable to leave 
conceptions of the good to the private realm and bracket them in the public realm – is itself a conception of the 
good.

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much more interested in the ways in which political processes and the 
‘background culture’ interact. 
This is fair enough. However, if Habermas does not suppress difference at the outset, the 
suppression of difference occurs as an outcome of his account of the deliberative process. In 
short, the end goal or result of deliberation should be some form of unity. Take, for instance, 
Habermas’s core concept of “communicative action”: 
[T]he concept of 
communicative action
refers to the interaction of at least two 
subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations…The 
actors seek to reach an understanding about the action situation and their plans of 
action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement…
[I]interpretation
refers in the first instance to negotiating definitions of the situation which admit 
of consensus (Habermas 1984, 86). 
In this short passage, he articulates the goals of communicative action as “understanding,” 
“agreement,” and “consensus.” Moreover, and in much more recent work, he specifies his 
“discourse principle” as follows: “Just those action norms [e.g. rules or institutional 
arrangements] are valid to which all possibly affected person could agree as participants in 
rational discourses” (Habermas 1996, 107). In other words, a law is legitimate, on this view, if 
everyone would agree to it, if it was legislated under ideal conditions and with the right 
procedures in place.
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Habermas, of course, recognizes that this is not likely to be achieved in 
reality – that “it is unclear how this procedural concept, so freighted with idealizations, can link 
up with empirical investigations that conceive politics primarily as an arena of power processes” 
(1996, 287). The discourse principle is, rather, conceived as a regulative ideal, a measure by 
which to evaluate existing institutions.
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Benhabib (1996, 70) identifies this ideal features as: “1) participation in such deliberation is governed by norms of 
equality and symmetry; all have the same chances to initiate speech acts, to question, to interrogate, and to open 
debate; 2) all have the right to question the assigned topics of conversation; and 3) all have the right to initiate 
reflexive arguments about the very rules of the discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied or carried 
out.” 

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Issues about plausibility aside, what is at question here is the theoretical goal itself: 
agreement and consensus. And, on this point, I think there can be little debate. To give but two 
more examples: “Communicatively acting subjects commit themselves to coordinating their 
action plans on the basis of a consensus…” (Habermas 1996, 119) Or, “the legal community 
constitutes itself…on the basis of a discursively achieved agreement (
ibid. 
449). So, while 
Habermas starts from the premise of difference, diversity, and pluralism – in a way that is 
laudably more open than the Rawlsian approach – he ends up trying to overcome these facts. As 
Gould (1996, 172) perfectly puts it: 
[T]he telos of the discourse, what characterizes its aim and method, is agreement.
Difference is something to be gotten past. And the reciprocal recognition is for 
the sake of common agreement rather than also for the sake of enhancing and 
articulating diversity. Diversity may be the original condition of the polyvocal 
discourse but univocity is its normative principle. 
 
We can now shift to our second major approach to the facts of difference, diversity and 
pluralism, characterized here by Mouffe’s (2000) “agonistic model of democracy.” Though they 
accomplish this in somewhat different ways, “in both Rawls and Habermas…the very condition 
for the creation of consensus is the elimination of pluralism from the public sphere” (Mouffe 
2000, 49). It is exactly this elimination of pluralism that Mouffe challenges.