The Democratic Venture

This chapter critically discusses deconstructive and deliberative approaches to the paradoxes of constitutional democracy. It is argued that Derrida’s deconstructive account of democracy presupposes constitutional safeguards that, in principle, check the pervertibility he identifies. Pervertibility cannot be eliminated, but deconstruction demands that we pursue the least perverting perversion. The deliberative and deconstructive accounts of constitutional making are then brought into dialogue. While they share a historical understanding of democratic legitimacy, there’s a key difference: the deliberative approach understands this process as a dialectical story of self-correcting learning processes, which risks slipping into self-congratulation and missing the injustice of our current practices. The deconstructive approach emphasises the ‘non-dialectizable’ antinomies of this process, which risks slipping into despair. Drawing on the insights of both, a less confident, but no less hopeful, deliberative-deconstructive approach is sketched out, one that maintains hope in the perfectibility of democracy and the promise of doing justice to the other, but which nevertheless remains haunted by an anxious vigilance regarding the inevitable aporias generated by our very striving for justice. The chapter ends by considering contemporary empirical research that would ground this approach.