Epistemic Justice and Democratic Legitimacy

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 794-810 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Dieleman
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Epistemic Injustice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Iris Marion Young ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Nancy Fraser

The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy.

Social inclusion, a challenge for deliberative democracy? Some reflections on Habermas’s political theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 136843102098378
Author(s):  
Isabelle Aubert
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
Iris Marion Young ◽  
Alexander Kluge ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Nancy Fraser ◽  
Theory Of Democracy

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views.

Conceptualizing Connectivity in Deliberative Democracy

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Carolyn M. Hendriks ◽  
Selen A. Ercan ◽  
John Boswell
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Deliberative Democracy ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
The Public ◽  
Deliberative System ◽  
Close Study ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Representative Process

Chapter 2 offers a critical review of three systemic accounts of deliberative democracy, focusing on their assumptions about democratic connectivity. It draws attention to the ‘communicative miracles’ that lie at the heart of each deliberative system account—‘miracles’ that are out of step with contemporary disconnects experienced in the representative process, in the public sphere itself, and along the policy process. The chapter shows that these ‘communicative miracles’ are not only theoretical blind spots, but also practical obstacles hindering deliberative democracy from speaking more directly to, and serving as a richer resource for, democratic renewal. The chapter calls for a more empirically informed account of connectivity in contemporary public deliberation, one that is grounded in the work and agency of those involved in making or strengthening connectivity. It argues that an abductive research approach that employs interpretive methods is particularly well suited for developing such empirically informed accounts of connectivity. The chapter concludes by making the case for the close study of contemporary political practices, especially focused on how diverse actors are experiencing democratic disconnects, and what actions they are taking to mend them.

The Priority of Public Reasons and Religious Forms of Life in Constitutional Democracies

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Cristina Lafont
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Public Deliberation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Political Deliberation ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Mutual Accountability

In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and obligations on all democratic citizens. The main advantage of this proposal is that it recognizes the right of all democratic citizens to adopt their own cognitive stance (whether religious or secular) in political deliberation in the public sphere without giving up on the democratic obligation to provide reasons acceptable to everyone to justify coercive policies with which all citizens must comply.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

scholarly journals Privacy in Public: A Democratic Defense

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-96
Author(s):  
Titus Stahl
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Privacy Protection ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Political Speech ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

AbstractTraditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from Helen Nissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine the capacity of citizens to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts with democratic self-determination.

scholarly journals Konflikt jako wartość? Demokracja agonistyczna a populizm europejski w ujęciu Chantal Mouffe

2018 ◽  
pp. 219-233
Author(s):  
Filip Biały
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Irrational Beliefs ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
The Public ◽  
Chantal Mouffe ◽  
Emotional Component ◽  
Agonistic Democracy ◽  
The Public Sphere

One of the most intriguing questions in political philosophy has long been the following: how to organize politics that not only appeases the conflict of groups and individuals but also allows to express even irrational beliefs. The answer that this article has dealt with is a proposition by Chantal Mouffe, called ‘agonistic democracy’. The concept is based on an claim that the exclusion of an emotional component from the public sphere can only lead to a political conflict. An example that confirms Mouffe’s assumptions is the expansion of European populism, which, according to the theory discussed in the article, may only be contained through recognizing the positive value of the conflictive nature of politics.

scholarly journals Religious Establishment According to a Substantive Ethics of Political Justice

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Tarcisio Amorim Carvalho
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Principles Of Justice ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Substantive Ethics ◽  
Religious Establishment ◽  
The Relationship

Contemporary political theorists often disagree on whether or not religious establishment is justified in liberal states, even when its existence does not constitute a hindrance to the basic rights of citizens. In this article, I contend that religious established does not raise issues of democratic legitimacy, by showing that political frameworks of justice are entangled with substantive conceptions of the good and ethical forms of life. Then, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s latest works on the relationship between religion and the public sphere, and Maeve Cooke’s readings thereof, I argue that religious symbols can contribute to the creation of meaningful imaginaries that inform moral norms and principles of justice. After this, I recall Axel Honneth’s conception of “struggles for recognition”, demonstrating that the recognition of specific collective traits, including religious, is necessary to provide citizens with a sense of worth and esteem.

scholarly journals The University as Public Sphere

1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Ambrozas
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Women's Studies ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Compte Rendu ◽  
Elite Institution ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The University ◽  
Nancy Fraser

Abstract: There is a certain parallel between arguments about the decline of the public sphere and the decline of the university today. Both institutions are said to be increasingly fragmented and politicized. In this paper, I mobilize Nancy Fraser's alternative account of the public in order to defend contemporary political changes in the university, such as affirmative action or women's studies programs. Such changes are necessary to transform an elite institution into a more democratic one and, in addition, they broaden the scope of our knowledge. Résumé: On peut établir un certain parallèle entre les arguments concernant le déclin de la sphère publique et le déclin de l'université aujourd'hui. On dit que les deux institutions deviennent de plus en plus fragmentées et politisées. Dans cet article, j'utilise le compte-rendu alternatif de la sphère publique donné par Nancy Fraser pour défendre les changements politiques contemporains dans l'université, comme l'action affirmative ou les programmes d'études des femmes. Ces changements sont nécessaires pour transformer une institution élite en institution plus démocratique et ils contribuent en outre à élargir l'éventail de nos connaissances.

Collective Voices Online

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Vittoria Bernardini
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Sexual Misconduct ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
The Public ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Nancy Fraser

The chapter investigates how women use the practice of speaking out in their activism to bring issues that are significant to them from the private sphere into the public sphere. Specifically, it focuses on analyzing how this was achieved in the case of the #MeToo movement, taken as the most prominent example of activism against sexual harassment in recent years. Using the conceptual tool of counter public sphere developed by Nancy Fraser, the chapter examines two relevant events from #MeToo: the sexual misconduct allegations against actor Aziz Ansari and the circulation of the so-called “Shitty Media Men” list.

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