For example, crucial to Jirgen Habermas's account of universalization is the idea that normative claims to validity are actually debated, that the justification of norms requires and results from the actual discourses of actual people.4 With Habermas's emphasis on constitutional forms, on the one side, and the corresponding alliance between liberal and deliberative democrats, on the other, we have a contemporary theory that finds justi.; ficatory elements in real-life political practices. Rather than providing rational reconstructions of everyday practices, the contemporary theory of deliberative democracy uses everyday practices as justifications for the validity of deliberative procedures. 5 Both normative and descriptive accounts of democratic procedures thus play key roles in theorists' accounts of deliberative democracy.
As it occupies this in-between space, this space between facticity and validityj democratic theory presents ideals and aspirations as always already present possibilities. In so doing, it brings utopia inside, elimnating it as an external space of hope. Yet by internalizing the hope that things might be otherwise, democratic\_ theory destroys that hope: potential problems are solved in advance, through democratic channels. We already know how to get there. We already have the procedures. Anything else is mere tweaking. Despite all our problems with dem�cracy, democracy is the solution to all our problems.6 The idea that democracy marks an empty place where things can be otherwise, that democratic procedures incorporate already the keys to revising and reforming the practice of democracy, becomes the conviction that there is nothing but, no alternative to, democracy. To this extent, democratic theory presents democracy as realized, as adequate to its notion. If this is the case, the problem is in the notion.
University Discourse
We can go some way toward understanding the problem contained in the notion of deliberative democracy when we recognize how it has consolidated around ideas of argument and deliberation.7 Democracy is envisioned as the exchange of reasons by\_participants in a discussion characterized by equality; inclusivity, reciprocity, and transparency. Such discussion among equals, however, is dearly but one particular model of discourse, one sort of idealized discourse among other possible configurations. Why just one?8
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