Article: Between consensus and conflict: Habermas, post-modern agonism and the early American public sphere *.

Introduction

The title of Chantal Mouffe's recent essay captures precisely--if inadvertently--the state of the debate over democratic theory: "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?" I have taken the liberty of adding emphasis to the word "or" to highlight the binary assumption that typifies much of this debate. Mouffe examines the Habermasian approach to discursive democracy as the "most theoretically sophisticated" version, but immediately applies an "either/or" analysis, juxtaposing Habermas's discursive democracy to her more agonistic and plural politics. (1) And she is hardly alone. A similarly reductionist bifurcation is evident in the exchange ...

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