ABSTRACT
I would like to examine the claim that public deliberation as such can be a legitimization process for principles and norms governing our collective democratic life, that 'popular sovereignty is a procedure' (Habermas, 1999, p.35). I will challenge this claim in the name of a conception of citizenship that values critical thought and reflective conscience as sources of normativity and that echoes a kind of 'Socratic citizenship' of the sort advocated by Dana Villa in his book Socratic Citizenship (2001, pp.248-9): 'a genuinely critical conception of citizenship, one based not on the morally dubious foundations of shared values or absolute truths, but rather on scepticism, intellectual honesty and the will to avoid injustice'.
