Rationality and pluralism in deliberative democracy: What about a deliberative pluralism?

This article addresses the question of whether the rationality of public communication is a necessary condition for it to fulfill legitimizing functions. This condition is increasingly questioned in light of society’s obviously “untranscendable” social and cultural diversity. In response, the article proposes a concept of deliberative pluralism aimed at realizing deliberative democracy as the exercise of “communicative power” (in the Habermasian sense) by citizens in a liberal democracy. Here, the legitimizing “force” of the rationality of public communication is related not so much to the possibilities for consensus-building as to the struggle against manipulations of public communication.