The paper explores the possible contributions of deliberative procedures of political will formation to solving the problems encountered by liberal democracies today. To begin with, four functions of liberal democracy are distinguished: securing international peace, guaranteeing legal as well as political peace domestically, and producing good active citizens. The following part of the argument distinguishes four structural features characteristic of democratic regimes: stateness, rule of law, political competition, and accountability of the rulers. Thirdly, a brief summary of critical accounts concerning democracy’s actual failures and symptoms of malfunctioning is presented. In the final section, two families of institutional innovations that are currently being proposed as remedies for the observed deficiencies of democracy are explored: those leading to a better aggregation of given preferences of the citizens and those aimed at improving the process of preference formation itself. It is the latter, which constitutes the fi eld of deliberative politics that is investigated at some length. Beneficial effects of deliberative procedures and essential features of deliberative structures are discussed with reference to latest developments in the theory and empirical research on deliberative democracy.
The essay explains the necessity of mechanisms that maintain a certain homogeneity of beliefs in human societies that rely on cooperation and discusses several causes for the decline of contemporary societies’belief in the attainability of truth and the reliability of science, one being the replacement of epistemology by the sociology of knowledge. It analyses on purely conceptual grounds the deleterious consequences that this decline must have for the stability of democracies and ends by showing some parallels between the rise of Fascism and National Socialism and the current situation.
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