DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY: A RHETORICAL CRITIQUE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56238/arev8n5-058Keywords:
Rule of Law, Deliberative Democracy, Legal Analytic Rhetoric, PragmatismAbstract
This article examines deliberative democracy as a contemporary attempt to reconstruct the legitimacy of the rule of law under conditions of normative pluralism and institutional complexity. While deliberative theory presents itself as a response to the erosion of legal authority, grounding legitimacy in public justification and discursive procedures, the article argues that this reconstruction rests on demanding and often unrealistic communicative, epistemic, and social assumptions. Drawing on a rhetorical perspective, classical theories of persuasion, the linguistic turn, and the notion of dissoi logoi, the analysis challenges the deliberative claim that political legitimacy can emerge from rational consensus independent of power relations and rhetorical inequality. The article shows that deliberative practices do not neutralize discretion or domination, but rather redistribute them through institutionally authorized vocabularies of justification that privilege certain speakers, forms of reasoning, and expertise. As a result, deliberative democracy risks converting legitimacy into a function of discursive competence and institutional position rather than democratic self‑rule. The final section argues that this dynamic has significant implications for the contemporary understanding of the rule of law, which increasingly operates not as a constraint on power but as a rhetorical register for legitimizing discretionary decisions ex post. The article concludes that deliberative democracy, far from overcoming the semantic hollowing‑out of the rule of law, may contribute to its consolidation.
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