Rawls and deliberative democracy

It seems very reasonable to link the ideas of Rawls on public reason and related notions with the idea of deliberative democracy. Apart from the fact that in recent writings Rawls himself makes the connection explicitly, ¹ we can ask whether any real compulsion to attach ‘deliberation’ and ‘democracy’ could have arisen at all without powerful contemporary forebears - Rawls and Habermas above all - emphasizing dialogical approaches to political principles and institutions. ² Rawls’s device of the original position famously models an ideal dialogue on principles of justice; Cohen’s influential deliberative model ³ clearly springs directly from these Rawlsian roots. The original position provides a means to assess different interpretations of social justice, while deliberative democracy brings together different preferences in order to subject them to the test of public and open scrutiny. One can agree that these chains of influence are real and still question fundamentally whether some of the links are strong enough to sustain them. Benhabib ⁴ pursues this task briefly, noting among other things that Rawls’s idea of public reason is about limits on how to reason rather than a process of actual reasoning in public. But it is worth paying closer attention to the issue in order to draw out (1) fundamental reasons why the Rawlsian project as Rawls presents it cannot be genuinely deliberative, and (2) the light that can be thrown on deliberative models of democracy by looking at basic Rawlsian categories in new ways.