ABSTRACT
This chapter examines radical democratic understandings of deliberation and broader democratic action. It outlines conventional liberal understandings of democratic deliberation and action in the public sphere, before detailing their various radicalizings. Examining the deliberative movement as a first radical response to liberal ideas, the chapter then traces the multi-faceted radical critique of the ideals significant for both liberal and deliberative approaches: rationality, negotiation and consensus. It presents an outline of how democratic deliberation and action might be conceived once conventional liberal understandings have been destabilized and radicalized. The chapter explains that they do all demonstrate and endorse models of deliberation, interaction and action that can be understood as comprising forms of democratic engagement and participation that work outside of – although they are not constitutively considered to be a replacement of – the liberal democratic preference for formalized indirect action.
