ABSTRACT
Ostensibly, dialogue is the very core of democracy. This seems to be such an evident condition of democratic society that it tends to fade smoothly into transparency, and thus be taken for granted. There are two sources of modern liberal democracy that explain such a taken-for-granted relation between dialogue and democracy. First, dialogue is indispensable in society, which has to accommodate different world-views and ideological standpoints. Dialogue seems thus to be a natural alternative to violence and coercion. Second, dialogue enables people to coordinate their actions and become involved in joint activities on the basis of rational deliberations. These two reasons seem to account for the apparent transparency of dialogue in democratic society. The aim of this chapter is to show that the relationships between dialogue and liberal democracy are more complicated than it may appear. Taking this into consideration, I propose my own version of democratic dialogue, derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue.
