Abstract

Philosophy's “linguistic turn” was destined to find its way into derivative disciplines such as political theory. In the last two decades, this turn has led to an absurd reductionism extrapolating the essence of existing democracies from their mode of communication. Flattening political theory, followers of this fashion rarely relinquish their fixation with the communicative component of modern democracies to the level of a multifaceted analysis. The central notion here is “deliberative democracy.” But is this a distinct model of democracy? For Seyla Benhabib, it means “elucidating the already implicit principles and logic of existing democratic practices” (p. 84) There are…