In this article, I aim to resuscitate discussions about the value of pragmatism for public administration by identifying some pragmatist tools that can transform the structures and processes of the administrative state. First, public administrators, having adopted a pragmatist fallibilism, will be able to make decisions and act in the absence of certainty. Second, the pragmatist emphasis on participatory inquiry makes possible a more democratic administrative state. Third, pragmatism helps define a new role for experts and expertise that can be used to realize the goals of democratic administration.
The deliberative turn in political philosophy sees theorists attempting to ground democratic legitimacy in free, rational, and public deliberation among citizens. However, feminist theorists have criticized prominent accounts of deliberative democracy, and of the public sphere that is its site, for being too exclusionary. Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib show that deliberative democrats generally fail to attend to substantive inclusion in their conceptions of deliberative space, even though they endorse formal inclusion. If we take these criticisms seriously, we are tasked with articulating a substantively inclusive account of deliberation. I argue in this article that enriching existing theories of deliberative democracy with Fricker's conception of epistemic in/justice yields two specific benefits. First, it enables us to detect instances of epistemic injustice, and therefore failures of inclusion, within deliberative spaces. Second, it can act as a model for constructing deliberative spaces that are more inclusive and therefore better able to ground democratic legitimacy.
My goal in this paper is to determine whether there exists good reason to apply to Rorty the label “deliberative democrat.” There are elements of Rorty’s work that count both for and against applying this label, which I investigate here. I conclude that, if we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that is not informed by a social epistemology that relies on Reason; if we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that has a wider view of reason and of reasons than is traditionally understood, then we can think of Rorty as a deliberativist; perhaps as a virtue deliberativist with an expansive idea of what counts a reason and what counts as a virtue.
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