Modest praise for political deliberation

this text analyzes the relationship between political deliberation and democracy. its content differs both from a scarcely normative idea of competitive politics, predominant in contemporary political science, and from a philosophical defense of the deliberation, founded on an idea of common reasonability or on an ideal of communicative speech. the central argument of the author is that deliberation constitutes a good instrument of improvement of competitive democracy. the reasons he gives are not those held by some contemporary political philosophers, inspired by problematic generalizations about the basic structures of the rationality and reasonability of citizens and their agents. the author stresses instead the capacity of deliberation to strengthen the epistemic and normative basis of the political decisions of the majority. the text discusses different visions of the benefits of political deliberation, some of then centered on their procedural conditions, others on the substantive quality of their results. besides, this paper analyzes, from a perspective closer to a neo aristotelian vision than to a modern contractualist tradition, the validity of the consensualist criteria to judge the quality of the deliberative reasons. finally, the text identifies the democratic deliberation with a critical instance of the justifying discourses of the exercise of political power, within contexts of pluralism and disagreement.