{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","uuid":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/search"},"page":{"printed_page":91,"pdf_page":101,"physical_index":101,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"2162e0ac8f049105d72593b4792f85b91902d3e8b5d5231286e248fe8b58ea39"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"Gutmann and Thompson are at pains to acknowledge the limits of deliberation. Not only do they allow that deliberation was unlikely to stop the Bush administration's march to war but they admit that the \"Bush administration relied to some extent on secret intelligence to defend its decision\" (s) . They also grant that deliberation has to stop well before a consensus is reached because decisions have to be made. Deliberation, they point out, \"must end in a decision\" even as deliberative democracy does not specify the procedures \"for reaching a final decision\" (18) . Deliberative democracy requires a supplement that it itself cannot provide. Gutmann and Thompson concede further that citizens wil often need to rely ori experts, that the \"deliberative mandate\" should not apply to all governmental institutions, and that deliberation need not always involve giving reasons-\"passionate rhetoric can be as justifiable as logical demonstration\" (32, 51) . These acknowledgments of the practical and institutional conditions of politics malce sense-but not as elements of a justification of a theory of deliberation. In the latter setting, they appear as so many exceptions, indeed, as easily allowing for precisely that sort of \"state of the exception\" a procedural notion of democratic legitimacy was designed to avoid. <sup>28</sup>\n\nThe limitations and expectations that sustain Guttman's and Thompson's notion of deliberation rest uneasily against their claims for democracy. Given the gap between discussion and decision, how can the decision be understood in terms of government by the governed? In other words, if democracy is conceptualized in terms of deliberative procedures and practices of justification, in what way are the acts and decisions that evade and supplement these practices democratic? Democracy seems limited to the discussions surrounding a decision, the discursive context of a decision, but forever unable to reach the decision itself. The decision continues to exceed the circulation of reasons. Gutmann and Thompson argue that democracy is an attribute of the inclusivity of the discussion (1o ). But this doesn't even touch on the problem of the relation of the discussion to the p olitical decision.29\n\nIn Gutmann's and Thompson's account of deliberative democracy, deliberation is self-justifying. Any problems it might encounter are best solved through more deliberation, in the future, after the decision. The benefits deliberation provides, especially insofar as there remains a gap between deliberation and decision, are reflexive and postponed, the bene-:fits of enhanced deliberative capacity in the future. This inclusion of the future to legitimate present practices, moreover, shields Gutmann's and Thompson's account of deliberative democracy from normative or principled critique. Rather than an outside from which one might criticize the present, the future is already included as a justification for the present, as a way of saying Let's just get on with it, we can redo it later. \"'When deliberation only circulates around the decision as a justifcation of itself, the demos never has to accept responsibility for the decision, much as the democratic theorist need not accept responsibility for a political outcome. The issue becomes the process and keeping the process open to a future it has already imagined in terms of itself.\n\nDEMOCRACY\n\n91","previous_page":90,"next_page":92}