Rawls and Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

Rawls’s influence was central in bringing deliberative democracy to the center stage of political philosophy in the 1990s. Through the seminal work of Joshua Cohen, a Rawlsian inflected theory of deliberative democracy came to dominate the early English-language articulations of this paradigm. This articulation took Rawls’s ideals of public justification, public reason, and liberal legitimacy and unpacked them in the form of a democratic theory that challenged the prevailing theories of democracy especially within political science. This chapter analyzes and evaluates three important versions of a Rawlsian theory of deliberative democracy found in the work of Joshua Cohen, Samuel Freeman, and the team of Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. The last two sections of the chapter chart developments in deliberative democracy that move away from a Rawlsian paradigm. Despite mapping the waning presence of Rawls in deliberative democratic theory, the chapter argues that the entire tradition in all its variations from the 1990s until today is deeply indebted to the ideal of public justification. This ideal is given its most powerful expression in the work of John Rawls.