ABSTRACT
Jürgen Habermas spawned a new way of thinking about the moral dimensions of democracy with the innovative concept of an “ideal speech situation.” That, at any rate, is the famous phrase, deriving from Habermas’s general account of descriptive truth as whatever could survive a certain idealized structure of interpersonal communication. Actually, the idea of Habermas’s that is more relevant to politics is his conception of an ideal practical deliberation, and the two are not just the same.1 Nevertheless, the “ideal speech situation” is an evocative phrase that has caught on, and we can safely treat it as the overarching idea that unies Habermas’s approaches to descriptive and normative validity. The Habermasian idea is that democratic legitimacy and authority might be explained if actual democratic practice could be shown to produce laws and policies that would have met with unanimous agreement in a certain ideal deliberative situation. One natural basis for thinking some actual democratic practice had this feature would be if it resembled ideal deliberative practice very closely. Some have been led to call for a democratic politics that seeks to resemble ideal deliberations,2 though I will give reason to doubt that this is Habermas’s view. More importantly, I will argue that it is an implausible view. The Habermasian approach is central to my topic, but my aim is not at all exegetical. Rather, I want to describe and defend a model of civility in political participation that gives a principled place for sharp, disruptive, and even suppressive participation under the right circumstances, without jettisoning the whole idea of an ideal deliberative situation. I will suggest that this view, which I call wide civility, should be more congenial to Habermasians than they might think, but that is secondary.
