Democracy and Disagreement

by Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson

The din and deadlock of public life in America--where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals made and unmade--reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for deliberative democracy today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral and political issues.



Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies--from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare--and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Political Science

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Amy Gutmann is the 8th President of the University of Pennsylvania and the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Communications, and Philosophy. She is a political theorist who taught at Princeton University from 1976 to 2004 and served as its Provost.

Reviews

[Sergei Moska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rightly considered to be a critical text in the (sub)field of deliberative democracy. The argument is interesting and wide in scope.

There are three very small issues that I have with the book. The first is that at times the analysis just fall short, in my opinion. Their chapter on utilitarianism is, in my opinion, weak. It almost comes off as a non-sequitur. This means that the problem isn't just aesthetic - it's that since it does not seem to flow logically from the preceding chapters, the authors end up trying to do a massive refutation of the use of utilitarianism to solve political conflicts without having done much "prep-work" to lay out the different types of utilitarianism they purport to reject. The consequence is that they end up (again, in my opinion) misrepresenting utilitarianism, or at least not clearly presenting its strongest formulations.

The second issue is related to the first. The authors discuss utilitarianism (and later on, libertarianism and "egalitarianism")'s failure to provide answers to intractable political problems. The discussion of libertarianism and egalitarianism makes sense, as the authors argue that their scheme incorporates important insights from both while avoiding each camp's vicious extremes. But the purpose of discussing utilitarianism left me confused. Is the point to take utilitarianism as a poster child of what Rawls would call a comprehensive doctrine, and to show that such doctrines fail? If so, why not discuss deontology as well? The discussions of libertarianism don't implicitly cover this - Wolff, for example, believes himself to be a deontologist while claiming to be an economic Marxist. This isn't that big of a deal, so long as we (I) understand the authors to be saying "Our scheme is awesome!", rather than the stronger "Our scheme is necessarily better than any comprehensive doctrine that purports to use one standard by which to judge all, including political, moral judgments."

The third issue isn't the authors' fault at all. I just had a tough time going through this book for some reason. I have no idea why. It's very well written, and quite clear. If I had to reach for a reason, maybe it's because the content of the book is actually well thought-out, and required more concentration that I had expected.

[Stephen Cotten · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's good to use one large word rather than several smaller words, but the authors tend to use one large word when one small word would do. It's a good book, and worth reading, but the use of language as a tool to seem intelligent rather than to express intelligence was irritating.