Deliberative democracy: History of an idea

Deliberative democracy finds its model in ancient democratic practices. Among modern thinkers, theorists of deliberative democracy find inspiration in Rousseau's political thought and his concept of the "general will", especially in his persistence that the general will is not a mere aggregation of individual wills. However, the idea of “general will”, public interest, and the care for the common good of the community, has been widely criticized as it appears that it does not leave the place for individual rights and freedoms. The goal of this paper is to to show that deliberative democracy does, indeed, strats of with individual rights and freedoms, but that it does not allow for democratic procedure to be reduced to the aggregation of individual preferences. Theorists of the deliberative democracy call into question the assumption that a collective decision-making procedure should be understood solely according the voting model. Through a process of public and rational discussion, voters do revise attitudes and initial preferences. Thus, as a result they reach either unanimous agreement or bring preferences closer to single-peakedness. In this way the model of deliberative democracy avoids paradoxes and problems that aggregative model of democracy encounters.