Simone Chambers

Rhetoric and the Public Sphere Has Deliberative Democracy Abandoned Mass Democracy

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric.

The Politics of Equality: Rawls on the Barricades

The title of this essay might strike some people as odd. Rawls a revolutionary? Could one ever imagine the careful, gentle, and eminently sensible figure of John Rawls manning a barricade? The very strangeness of this image illustrates the uneasy connection between equality and politics in his work. Rawlss egalitarian vision would take nothing short of a revolution to bring about, and Rawls was anything but a revolutionary. Simone Chambers is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto (schamber@chass.utoronto.ca). Special thanks go to Robert Amdur for his helpful, careful, and as usual, accurate criticisms of an earlier draft. She would also like to thank Steven E. White for his research, the many reviewers at Perspectives on Politics for their comments, and Joe Carens, Duncan Ivison, and Jeff Kopstein for all the equality talk.

Secularism Minus Exclusion: Developing a Religious-Friendly Idea of Public Reason

It used to be, not so long ago, that the academic debate about the place of religious reasons in the public sphere could neatly be divided into exclusivists and inclusivists.1 The former argued for the exclusion of religion from public debate and politics and the latter for the inclusion of such considerations. Furthermore, exclusivists were for the most part secular philosophers advocating secularism, while inclusivists were religious thinkers criticizing contemporary understandings of secularism. The picture is no longer so neat and tidy. To pick a not entirely arbitrary start of the messiness, from the publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism until today, the debate has evolved in interesting and I think important ways.

“Who shall judge?” Hobbes, Locke and Kant on the construction on public reason

This paper investigates early modern and enlightenment roots of contemporary ideas of public reason. I argue that concepts of public reason arose in answer to the question ‘who shall judge?’ The religious and moral pluralism unleashed by the reformation led first to the weakening of authoritative common forms of reasoning, this in turn and more importantly led to the question who is the final arbiter when a political community is faced with deep disagreement about political/moral questions. The rise of pluralism meant that to the question ‘what are the standards of public right?’ is added the corollary and equally important question ‘who judges when those standards are violated?’ The answer is that the public judges. Public reason thus refers to the role of the public as judge of public right and not simply to a set of reasons that an actual public happens to share. On this reading of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, the initial contract recedes in importance while the seat of authoritative political judgment comes to the fore.

The cultural foundations of public policy A comment on Georgia Warnke

This article argues that the equality versus difference dispute in feminism is not essentially a dispute about the basis of public policy as Georgia Warnke implies. Furthermore, rarely can public policy issues concerning women be resolved by direct appeal to interpretation. Interpretation should be understood as offering a model of cultural transformation rather than public policy adjudication.