Discourse and democracy

Jürgen Habermas refers to his democratic theory as a “discourse theory of democracy”. He starts from the idea that politics allows people to organize their lives together and decide what common rules they will live by. To do this, it must accord a prominent place to political argumentation and justification. Because these practices are inherently communicative ones, they bear the same implicit presuppositions as any other forms of communication. On this basis, it is possible to discern various norms, attitudes and assumptions that people must make in order to engage in political argumentation.

In Habermas's analysis, these features of political practice form a set of “pragmatic presuppositions” that people make when engaging in political communication. Most crucially, deliberative participants have to presuppose that anyone can take part in discourse and anyone can introduce and challenge claims that are made there. They must also see one another as equals, reciprocally granting one another equal status in deliberation. Further, they must assume that others are under no compulsion while they are participating, by either the direct or implied force of others. Participants must “presuppose” these features in the sense that they wouldn't think of a political argument as truly justified if some people, who may have important things to say about it, have been excluded from the discussion, or if the participants don't see one another as equals who needed to be persuaded to agree to the claims being made.