POLITICAL STUDIES: 2011

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00875.x

Legitimate Speech and Hegemonic Idiom:

The Limits of Deliberative Democracy in
the Diversity of its Voices post_875 1..20

Kevin Olson
University of California, Irvine

This article locates tensions at the heart of deliberative democracy by contrasting insights of Pierre Bourdieu and
Jürgen Habermas. It argues that deliberation contains implicit presuppositions of two opposing sorts. Universalising
presuppositions lead people to treat one another as equals. Differentiating ones lead people to treat one another as of
greater or lesser worth in political dialogue. They undercut deliberative democracy by rendering some points of view
less valuable than others. These contrary tendencies cannot be reconciled in a purely theoretical way; they are
contextually specific challenges that must be negotiated in politics itself. In response, this article seeks to clarify the
difficulties faced by deliberative regimes and better understand their relation to other forms of politics.

Keywords: Bourdieu; Habermas; deliberative democracy; marginalization; the political

Deliberative democracy has made great strides in recent years. One of its most widely
advertised advantages has been its ability to accommodate the diversity of democratic
citizens. Deliberation renegotiates preferences and values through shared modes of political
argumentation, and can thus span a wide range of social and cultural differences. This
strategy of dealing with difference has tended to follow classically liberal lines – the
confessional neutrality of the state – and universalist, neo-Kantian ones in which differences
are epiphenomenal to deeper constants in human nature, interaction and communication.
At the same time that proponents tout deliberative democracy’s ability to accommodate
difference, they increasingly recognize the demands that deliberation places on citizens.
They have tried to assess the capabilities, intentions, attitudes, orientations and background
assumptions needed by deliberating citizens. This has largely been an attempt to respond to
difficulties in deliberative democracy itself – to the charge that it is highly demanding of
people’s time and capabilities. In part, however, it is also an emancipatory aspect of the
theory. Assessments of citizen capabilities can be used as critical leverage against actually
existing democracy, highlighting the ways that actual people and polities fall short when
compared with more ideally considered deliberative citizens and contexts. An understand-
ing of the demands of deliberation provides normative arguments to improve actually
existing democracy.
While deliberative democratic theory has moved forward on both of these fronts, little
attention has been paid to the perverse synergies between them. The different capacities of
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2 KEVIN OLSON

citizens frequently correspond to their social differences from one another. This is a
potentially awkward pattern, in which some kinds of people – specific identity groups –
seem to be less capable than others. This situation should be profoundly troubling to the
liberal democratic imagination, with its structuring ideal that ‘all [people] are created equal’.
If people are in fact unequal in their specifically democratic capacities, and these inequalities
follow the lines of social difference, deliberative democracy may privilege some kinds of
people above others, reproducing social differences rather than blunting their effects. In this
case, deliberation would simply perpetuate power, difference and inequality rather than
thematizing them as topics of common concern.
The work of Pierre Bourdieu provides a unique perspective on this situation. Bourdieu
draws an incisive picture of the origins of social difference, tracing the forms of power and
exclusion that maintain systems of social distinction. Insightful studies by Margaret Kohn
(2000), Keith Topper (2001) and Clarissa Hayward (2004) have brought this work to bear
on deliberative democracy. Each thematizes the effects of power and social difference on
deliberative equality with explicit reference to Bourdieu’s rich conceptual resources. In
what follows, I will put a sharper edge on this already trenchant line of criticism. I will argue
that a Bourdieuean critique of deliberative democracy does not simply identify problems of
deliberative practice, but more profoundly, that it reveals deliberative democracy to be
cross-cut by constitutive, conflicting presuppositions that people make about one another
and about political interaction. These presuppositions are manifested within political speech.
Some of them tend to create a universalist basis in deliberation while others tend to
differentiate and divide social groups. I will trace the uneasy tensions between these
universalizing and differentiating tendencies, arguing that there is no easy answer to the
question of which prevails because the matter cannot be resolved on purely theoretical
grounds. As a result, the predominant strategies of (liberal) neutrality and (neo-Kantian)
universalism run up against their limits in trying to deal with this situation. In fact, I believe
that the tensions within political speech are inherent and constitutive of a broader politics of
deliberation. They cannot be overcome theoretically and thus must be negotiated in
practice by actual citizens.
A more subtle understanding of this problem, I will argue, reveals some important lessons
about the limits of deliberation, the self-referential challenges faced by deliberating citizens
and deliberative democracy’s relation to other forms of politics and to the political more
broadly construed. The ultimate value of surveying these problems is not to ‘resolve’ them
from a theoretical perspective, then, but to arrive at a more nuanced and critical under-
standing of deliberative democracy’s limits and potential.

Universalizing Presuppositions of Deliberative Democracy

Since deliberative democracy is seen as a relatively demanding practice, its proponents are
increasingly aware of the need to describe the competencies, motivations and orientations
that would be necessary to practise it. These are typically personal and interpersonal
conditions required for deliberation: abilities to raise and resolve issues, norms of respect and
reciprocity, rules about who can participate, what participation would consist in and what
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attitudes and capabilities fellow participants must have. Such conditions are described in a
relatively straightforward way in many versions of deliberative theory. Amy Gutmann and
Dennis Thompson, for instance, frame their theory around the ‘conditions for deliberation’
(Gutmann and Thompson, 1996, pp. 52–164). For them, this consists in conditions of
reciprocity, publicity and accountability. John Rawls follows a similar path, theorizing
deliberation as rooted in various powers of citizens: their reasonableness and rationality, as
expressed in their capacity for a sense of justice and a conception of the good, their
intellectual powers of thought, judgment and inference, their readiness to propose and abide
by fair terms of cooperation with others, their desire to be recognized as fully cooperating
members of society, and so on (Rawls, 1993, pp. 47–88). These sorts of specifications
describe the material, cognitive and intentional preconditions of deliberation, as considered
from a theorist’s perspective. They lay out conditions that would have to be met for
particular forms of deliberation to proceed.
Jürgen Habermas takes a more epistemically subtle approach. Rather than identify precon-
ditions of deliberation – things that must be in place before the practice can get under way
– Habermas seeks to identify some of the norms and attitudes that underlie political
argumentation. These are not preconditions of deliberation, but presuppositions. They are
attitudes and beliefs that people would have to have in order to conduct various deliberative
practices; they are implicit in the goals that people actually aim at in those practices.
The difference between preconditions and presuppositions is a subtle but important one.
Theories of deliberation focusing on its preconditions must first model what they think
deliberation ideally would be, then argue that their model should be implemented as
described. The preconditions theorized by the model – particular kinds of argument,
dialogue, orientations towards one’s own beliefs – are modeling assumptions that become
necessary for realizing it. As such, the ‘preconditions’ of deliberation are necessary only if
one accepts the entire model being proposed.
The Habermasian view is more flexible and epistemically subtle. Rather than seeking to
impose a theoretically elaborated model of deliberation on an unruly reality, it tries to
derive one from what is already given. It attempts to identify the actual presuppositions that
real people make in conducting a practice, looking for ways in which they would fall short
of their own implicit standards of speech and argument. Because the features described by
this method reflect the intentions that participants have towards their own practices, these
features are presuppositions rather than preconditions. They need not be fulfilled before
deliberation can occur; rather, they are (counterfactually) presupposed as an attitude or
orientation by people entering into such practices.
An important example of such presuppositions, according to Habermas, is participants’
recognition of one another as equals. From this perspective, people would need to take a
reciprocal attitude towards one another in order to deliberate, expecting that their dialogue
partners would do the same. This reciprocity takes the form of treating one another with
respect and sincerely attempting to understand their claims. Further, deliberators must
presuppose that the people they attempt to communicate with are competent in important
ways. They must assume that people have basic capabilities of public speech, reasoning,
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argument and comprehension (compare Bohman, 1996, ch. 3). They must assume that
others have the ability to understand political claims and take a position on them, the
capability to imagine the world from another’s perspective, and the cognitive maturity to
evaluate political claims based on their effects upon all those affected (Habermas, 1990,
pp. 62–8).
The presuppositions identified in this way are constitutive ones. They constitute the practice
of deliberative democracy by articulating what it means to deliberate politically with others.
In Habermas’ account, deliberation ‘pragmatically presupposes’ such capabilities and cir-
cumstances (Habermas, 1979, pp. 1–68; McCarthy, 1978, pp. 272–91). This means that
participants could not consistently claim to deliberate if they did not make such presup-
positions. It would not make sense to claim one is deliberating without at the same time
making these presuppositions about the meaning of the practice and the best ways to
conduct it.
The presuppositions of deliberative democracy are also universalizing ones. They reveal a
universal core within deliberative practice, one in which people must presuppose equality
and reciprocity in order to communicate. To see one another as fellow deliberators, people
must treat one another as equals who have competences similar to their own. Because this
is a presupposition rather than a precondition, people need not actually be equal or fully
competent in order to communicate. Rather, they must presume equality and competency
of one another, perhaps counterfactually. These notions are abstract and universal to an
extent: they apply to any prospective dialogue partner, and in political speech, they apply to
anyone within the public sphere.
Assessments like this are made from a theorist’s perspective. They try to identify the
idealized form of a practice that is already proceeding in a normal, everyday fashion. Actual
practices need not be perfect or ideal in themselves, because it is the theorist who grasps the
form they would take were they to proceed along lines of idealized self-consistency. This
allows an assessment of what actors ‘must’ presuppose in practice, even if they are not
consciously aware of such presuppositions. These presuppositions may be displayed in
action without reaching the level of conscious reflection. Identifying them allows a
distinction between implicit norms and the facts of actual practice, giving theorists critical
purchase on thinking about how things could be otherwise.
In spite of the critical sophistication of this method, it cannot avoid some distance between
theorist and participant. The ‘implicit’ presuppositions of a practice are assessed by consid-
ering what would have to be true if the practice were performed in a fully consistent
manner. They are implicit against the background of a hypothetical interpretation, and
animate the theorist’s mind more than the person whose practices are alleged to presuppose
them (Olson, 2003, pp. 278–88; 2007, pp. 334–7). In this kind of interpretive generalization,
there is always a danger of misinterpreting the presuppositions that participants ‘must’ make.
Interpreters risk projecting a logic and consistency on to a real situation that participants do
not share. In that case, a theorist may identify ‘implicit presuppositions’ that are not actually
implicit. To retain its critical bite, such an interpretation must always be aware of its
interpretive, provisional and fallible character.
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Differentiating Presuppositions of Deliberative Democracy

While deliberation can be characterized by a set of interpretive generalizations about its
implicit forms of universality, it can also be described by presuppositions of a much less
universal sort. These are forms of differentiation cutting crosswise to the egalitarian and
reciprocal presuppositions I have just discussed. They are cultural understandings that
operate in the background of deliberation, coloring norms, rules, expectations and the way
participants think about one another. Here intangible, culturally embedded ideals of
citizenship and participatory agency are intermixed with notions of social difference, race,
gender, wealth, class, education and other forms of group differentiation. Like those
identified by deliberative theorists, these ideas are also interpreted as being presupposed in
practice. They are ‘natural’ orientations that people adopt towards others, coloring their
attitudes and behavior towards them. Markers of group identity – drawn from the mundane
details of daily life – cue intuitive knowledge of social classification. These classificatory
markers evoke a wealth of other associations about the character of the people to whom
they are ascribed.
Pierre Bourdieu has made a singularly important contribution to understanding such forms
of differentiation. His work is interpretive in much the same way as Habermas’. It is based
on social scientific observation and uses the data to infer presuppositions that people make
in actual practice. Like Habermas’ work, Bourdieu’s makes interpretive projections of what
people ‘must be’ presupposing for their actions to make sense. Like Habermas’ inferences,
Bourdieu’s are driven by an idea of consistency in practice, a consistency that is explained
by the idea that people act in ways that maintain and improve their social position (compare
Honneth, 1995).
Beyond these broad similarities there are some important differences, however. While
Habermas’ interpretive strategy relies on an interpreter’s idea of fully consistent practice,
Bourdieu’s is guided by an interpretation of practitioners’ revealed preferences. He uses
ethnographic observation and large-sample survey data to gather information on the
choices people make and the tastes they report. The observed clustering of these prefer-
ences provides a basis for generalizations about the dynamics of social mobility and group
formation. These allow Bourdieu to draw a careful map of group differences, tracing these
relations as positions within social space (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 229–51; 1998). This inter-
pretive picture shows people defining, defending and transforming the logic of social
position, and improvising within the rules of distinction to improve their own status
(Topper, 2001). In the end, then, Bourdieu shares Habermas’ interpretive orientation and
tries to provide similar kinds of insight to illuminate hidden characteristics of mundane
practice.
Bourdieu’s key interpretive claim is that culture, identity and social difference are embodied
phenomena. According to him, social diversity and differentiation are lived forms of
identity. They include forms of speech, expression, bodily comportment, taste, disposition
and attitude – the full range of socialized behaviors that allow us to distinguish the members
of various groups from one another. Bourdieu refers to these embodied behavioral ten-
dencies as habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, ch. 2, ch. 4; 1984, ch. 3). Habitus is a relational property,
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a tendency for people to exhibit durable dispositions that vary within socially prescribed
limits. Once an individual is socialized into the mores of a particular subgroup, their identity
is embodied in ways that are hard to change. It is thus quite difficult to impersonate
successfully another group’s repertoire of socialized behaviors and dispositions. Because of
this, habitus causes great difficulty for anyone seeking to change their social position
(Topper, 2001, pp. 45–9). It hinders social mobility, requiring people to change who they are
in the most profoundly embodied and habitual sense.

The durability and ‘naturalness’ of habitual tendencies is what allows us to use them as a
basis for sorting people into groups. This is as true of speech and linguistic behavior as it
is of any other form of practice. Speech idioms, vernaculars, forms of ‘folk reasoning’,
nuances of expression, norms of address and implicit codes of self-presentation are all
specific to particular groups. They provide subtle cues that allow people to identify others
as like or different from themselves. Individuals who share a language will be able to
understand one another, but group-specific idioms permit them to maintain a clear sense
of group identity within that shared communication. I will call this amalgam of informal,
shared idioms the social patterning of speech. It traces the lines of a linguistic habitus that
locates people in social space according to the way they talk. This includes accent, but also
subtle forms of body language, posture, facial expression and address – the words that are
used as well as the way speech is delivered.

The social patterning of speech is so pervasive and intuitive as to pass unnoticed. It provides
a great deal of information about others in daily communication that we are hardly aware
of. Speech carries markers of group identity: class, education, ethnicity, geographic back-
ground, age and gender. Bourdieu describes such speech as ‘discourses that are stylistically
marked in their production ... and reception’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 39). They are marked by
largely unconscious aspects of identity, rather than by any consciously held notions of style
per se. The differentiating effect of such utterances is no less real, however. They differ-
entiate groups from one another in informal but widely recognized ways, sorting people
into an implicit scheme of classification that ascribes different statuses to different identities.

Consider, for instance, the wealth of information packed into a pair of examples chosen
almost at random from literature. A skilled author like William Faulkner is able to draw on
our shared classificatory schemes, including ideas about group variations in speech, to
telegraph important information about his characters without having to give that infor-
mation explicitly. In The Sound and the Fury, we find the character Luster saying:
He dont know what he want to do. He think he want to go up yonder where they knocking
that ball. You sit down here and play with your jimson weed. Look at them chillen playing in
the branch, if you got to look at something. How come you cant behave yourself like folks
(Faulkner, 1929, p. 15 [sic throughout]).

The printed page provides a poor rendering of the physicality and sonority of human
speech. Yet Faulkner does a decent job of conveying rural American Southern regionalism,
as well as a kind of physical bluntness, directness and informality. Combined with word
choice (‘up yonder’,‘they knocking that ball’,‘them chillen’...), the overall effect is to sketch
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the flavor of a certain way of talking, thus of a certain form of identity – an entire linguistic
habitus – that is implied even though it cannot be fully shown on a printed page.
Like any other form of identity, this one is relational. That can be seen by contrasting it with
the speech of another character in the same novel. Mrs Bland is represented as more upright
and higher class. This is partly reflected in her speech:
Quentin Compson, what would your mother say? A young man naturally gets into scrapes, but
to be arrested on foot by a country policeman.What did they think he’s done, Gerald? ... Now,
Quentin, you tell me what all this foolishness is about (Faulkner, 1929, p. 181).

Here the more educated, more cosmopolitan habitus of the character is reflected simply by
the use of standard English, a strong contrast to Luster’s Southern regionalism. The rhythm
of the words, word choice and other subtleties imply a wholly different habitus as well: a
sort of bustling moral rectitude. The contrast between Luster and Mrs Bland leaps off the
page even in these decontextualized examples, precisely because their speech conveys
differences in habitus that are relational contrasts between differing forms of social identity.
Popular television and film also use these shared conventions for connoting information
about characters and their background. Social class, education and intelligence, for instance,
are regularly implied. In the US, particular British accents connote culture and breeding.
Cockney and Appalachian accents imply poverty and lack of education, the Appalachian
variant symbolizing stupidity and lack of worldliness while the Cockney variety implies a
street-smart cleverness. In cases like this, stereotypes are not irrelevant or hyperbolic; they
are the point. Understanding a stereotype relies on culturally embedded knowledge about
different kinds of people and their characteristics. It plays on the schemas of classification
that a culture uses to differentiate types of people. Stereotypes in the media are merely
exaggerations of already understood forms of social classification.
Social patterning gives us the insight that the content of speech cannot be understood apart
from its social context. Propositional content is the hallmark of deliberative democracy, in so
far as it allows people to make claims about facts, values or inner psychic states (Habermas,
1984, pp. 233–42; 1998a, pp. 215–55, pp. 277–306). Social patterning reveals this content to
be intertwined with all of the rhetorical subtleties and forms of bodily comportment that
accompany speech. The validity of claims – as Habermas himself acknowledges – depends
on their social currency (Geltung), on what people are willing to accept. People accept such
claims for many reasons, including the quality and quantity of evidence adduced, the form
in which it is adduced, who is presenting it, how credible they are and how sincere they
seem to be (a determination that depends in part on subtle cues of self-presentation and
comportment). In short, evaluating the content of a claim – its validity (Geltung) – is a
thoroughly social exercise that relies on the social, relational and embodied character of
speech (Kohn, 2000, pp. 409–17). It draws heavily on socially embedded values that are both
group-specific and contested (Bourdieu, 1984; 1991, p. 40; 1996). As Bourdieu puts it,
The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite
inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely to be recognized as
acceptable in all the situations in which there is occasion to speak ... Speakers lacking the
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legitimate competence are de facto excluded from the social domains in which this competence
is required, or are condemned to silence ( Bourdieu, 1991, p. 55, emphases in original).

Evaluation turns, in other words, on many of the subtle aspects of interaction that Bourdieu
characterizes. This includes the way a given society represents and values different kinds of
people. Such forms of valuation in turn have everything to do with the competence,
credibility and sincerity people are accorded by others. And these attributes, as Bourdieu
shows, are socially patterned and unequally distributed.
Like the analysis conducted by deliberative theorists, this one reveals presuppositions
implicit in communication. They are presuppositions about the norms of self-presentation,
comportment, address and argumentation proper to different speech situations. These are
assumptions we make about practices we already engage in, particularly focusing on our
expectations and attitudes towards the others with whom we interact. Like those identified
by deliberative theorists, these are largely implicit, informing our practices in important
ways of which we are seldom aware.
The presuppositions given to us by social patterning are also different in important ways
from the ones traced by deliberative theorists, however. Unlike the universalizing ones
detailed above, these are differentiating presuppositions. They are rooted in group identities,
and tend to define the boundaries of groups by displaying who follows their norms as a
matter of habit and who does not.Whereas the universalizing presuppositions of commu-
nication require us to treat others as people like us, differentiating norms lead us to treat
some others as like us and others as not like us. They are the basis for a system of
classification in which equality and reciprocity hold only within groups, whereas differential
treatment is the norm outside them.
Although universalization and differentiation seem at odds, these two kinds of presuppo-
sition do not necessarily contradict one another. The two subsist together, each largely
implicit in communication but serving important communicative functions that are easily
understood by participants. Universalizing presuppositions provide a structure of intelligi-
bility for language. They characterize the linguistic and social assumptions that we have to
make about others for their utterances to have meaning. Differentiating presuppositions
provide a different kind of intelligibility. Their implicit coding of identity is one of the ways
we evaluate the validity of claims being made in communication. They provide some of the
social background against which we assess the reliability of statements about the world and
the likelihood that claims of value correspond to something we would also find persuasive.
As such, they are intimately connected with the communicative functions of speech and the
flow of ideas in the public sphere. They operate in the same modality as presuppositions of
equality and reciprocity, but with very different social effects.

Legitimate Speech
If forms of speech are partly patterned by underlying social dynamics, it is no surprise that
they replicate some of the broader patterning of society itself. As Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels note, dominant groups have greater means to influence the ideas that dominate in
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society (Marx and Engels, 1970, pp. 64–8). They argue that dominant groups control the
means of symbolic production – the material and technological means for creating and
propagating ideas. From a contemporary perspective we can see that dominant groups also
control less tangible forms of symbolic production. Among these are norms of language,
argumentation and citizen competence. These norms establish ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’,
‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ forms of practice, setting the standards of interaction within a
given society. They tend to coincide with the native modes of speech and action of the
groups dominating the cultural and economic domains. As Bourdieu indicates, dominant
cultural and economic groups attempt to universalize their own tastes, manners, habits and
norms (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 244–56). Their norms and ideals are framed as normal and
natural, even though they ultimately arise from specific groups of people and attain their
‘universal’ status through the social, cultural and economic power of those groups.
Following this line of analysis, Bourdieu describes the way his most upper-class subjects
distinguish themselves in the context of a survey interview:
Control over the social situation in which culture operates is given to them by the very
unequally distributed capacity to adopt the relation to language which is called for in all
situations of polite conversation (e.g. chatter about cinema or travel), and which presupposes
an art of skimming, sliding and masking, making abundant use of all the hinges, fillers and
qualifiers identified by linguists as characteristic of bourgeois language ( Bourdieu, 1984,
p. 174).

Upper-class subjects show unselfconscious abilities to take control of discursive situations

because the devices for doing so are derived from their own linguistic habitus. Similarly,
they show a ‘natural’ sense of ease when functioning within the dominant idiom because
it is their own (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 255).
This naturalization of particular idioms produces what Bourdieu, paraphrasing Marx and
Engels, refers to as ‘the “concentration in a few individuals” of the capacity to produce
discourse about the social world, and through this, the capacity for consciously changing
that world’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 397). It results in the idea that those whose opinions and
speech are legitimate are most qualified to have opinions and to speak. This in turn creates
the corollary idea that political competence – the ability to have and express valid opinions
about politics – is not equally possessed by everyone. Having political opinions is not simply
a matter of considering one’s interests in relation to important issues, as most suppose, but
more richly a matter of ascribed (and self-perceived) competence. Being ‘competent’ is in
turn a matter of having one’s skills and capabilities socially recognized. This recognition is
based not simply on objective standards of performance like language ability, but addition-
ally on the ascribed status of one’s identity characteristics (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 399,
pp. 405–10).
The effects of social distinction go beyond mere speaking, then. They color a person’s social
status as a speaker and his or her self-perceived qualification to have and express political
opinions. The cluster of dominant norms and practices defining competence, socially
determined and ascribed through and through, tautologically defines the members of
dominant groups as ‘most competent’. People of dominant identities are ascribed greater
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competence than others, and not coincidentally those people are more likely to have
political opinions and feel entitled to express them. Such recognition in turn consolidates
and reproduces their dominance. Others are correspondingly devalued in their competence
both to speak and to have opinions. Because of their strategic import in reproducing
dominance, I will call these largely implicit yet shared definitions of competence the
hegemonic idioms of their society.
Hegemonic idioms tend to take specific form in political communication as legitimate speech
(Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 43–65, pp. 107–16). This is the tendency to judge particular forms of
speech and argument as correct or legitimate while ruling other forms incorrect and
illegitimate. Some claims are accorded greater legitimacy and better uptake than others
based on who advances them, in what language and with what social background.
Specifically, the speech of already dominant groups tends to be seen as more legitimate
because it is produced and delivered in one of the hegemonic idioms. The patterns
characteristic of legitimate speech translate readily into the deliberative realm. Clarissa
Hayward insightfully identifies some of the challenges that they pose for deliberative
democracy. Surveying empirical literature on communication, she shows how subtle,
group-based differences in form and style of public speaking are perceived as delivering
more or less persuasive speech (Hayward, 2004, pp. 14–8). Styles of speech linked to gender
and ethnicity affect ‘the extent to which [a person] can induce listeners to alter their
opinions to correspond more closely to the position that she advocates’ (Hayward, 2004,
p. 16). Hayward frames these empirically observed differences explicitly in Bourdieu’s
terms, showing how linguistic habitus generates differences within deliberation itself. She
argues further that these differences lie beyond the reach of the standard remedies for
inequality proposed by deliberative theorists (Hayward, 2004, pp. 5–7). As a result, some
socially patterned forms of deliberative participation are privileged over others and some
kinds of people are given more credence than others.
We can push this line of critique further by looking at the implicit tensions within
deliberative practice. Here we see not only the tendency of linguistic habitus to be
implicit yet unnoticed, as Hayward describes (2004, pp. 11–2), but even more problem-
atically its tensions with other elements implicit in deliberative practice. The social pat-
terning of speech is a particular problem for deliberative democracy because deliberation
implicitly includes two very different kinds of presupposition, one tending towards uni-
versalization, the other towards differentiation. The intimate combination of these two
tendencies conditions our judgments about the competence of fellow deliberators and the
legitimacy of their contributions. It creates implicit, performative notions of deliberative
competence and articulates subtle ideas of correctness and legitimacy that are derived
from ideas about the capacities deliberative citizens need. Deliberative competence is not
a value-free assessment of abstract cognitive and communicative capability, however, but
one patterned by the social dynamics underlying our evaluations of who is qualified to
deliberate. Those high in cultural or economic capital tend to exhibit a sense of entitle-
ment to speak, and especially, to speak authoritatively. They not only take up the most
time in conversation but also feel free to bend the rules of interaction, redefining and
restructuring the interaction itself (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 174). As we have seen, they are also
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judged most competent to speak and to have opinions, and their speech and opinion are
judged most legitimate.
The patterning of deliberation follows particular class and occupational lines. It valorizes
many of the same competences of public speech, persuasion, organization and expert
knowledge that professional life does. These activities are routine business for upper-
middle-class professionals (and, Bourdieu notes, academics [1997, pp. 83–4]), but much less
frequently engaged in by others (Verba et al., 1995, ch. 11). Similarly, generating and
applying classificatory schemes – an activity commonly associated with thought, argumen-
tation and speech – is related to social position, occupation and education (Bourdieu, 1984,
pp. 408–9).
This is not intended as an exhaustive description of social reality, of course. Rather, it
traces one kind of danger in social interaction: one in which discourse is influenced in part
by forms of social differentiation. A more comprehensive analysis of the situation should
take account of the conflicting social forces articulated in speech. From Bourdieu’s per-
spective, hegemony is more a matter of intention than fact. Dominant groups struggle
with one another to define the criteria of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘legitimate’ and ‘ille-
gitimate’, ‘competent’ and ‘incompetent’, seeking to advance understandings of these
terms that play to their own strengths (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 283–317). At the same time,
subordinate groups have some abilities to contest or reject dominant idioms. The very
forms of closure that trap people in their own social milieu can at times provide alter-
native sites for political praxis. Linguistic communities can function as ‘subaltern public
spheres’, sheltered from the delegitimizing efforts of dominant groups and fostering alter-
native languages of agency, counter-hegemony and (counter-) identity formation (Fraser,
1997; Hayward, 2004, pp. 6–7; Kohn, 2000, pp. 425–6; Olson, 2008). Cultures of resistance,
street slangs and defiant subcultures can be used to resist dominant idioms as well, even
while dominant groups struggle to assert their hegemony (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 154–5;
Stille, 2002). Hegemony, then, is always partial, incomplete, in process and under
contention.
Hegemony is also undermined to an extent by the complexity and indeterminacy of
language. Speech genres are multiple and operate under many different logics. As Mikhail
Bakhtin shows, social and ideological contradictions disrupt attempts to impose unity on
language (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 259–91; compare Kerleroux, 1984, pp. 53–69; Kohn, 2000, pp.
412–6). They create linguistic differences between past and present, between social groups,
and across other lines of social differentiation like occupation. These various language
communities bring a proliferation of speech norms with them. Discourse is thus complex,
indeterminate and contradictory. Such centrifugal tendencies undermine hegemony to
some extent, preventing language from being wholly dominated by the interests of domi-
nant groups.
However, an opposite, centripetal tendency is also in play.Would-be dominant groups aim
to standardize language, establish rules of correct usage and delegitimize other idioms, thus
reinforcing their own hegemony. To do this, they must actively struggle against the kinds
of centrifugal tendencies identified by Bakhtin. Language is therefore traced by two
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conflicting tendencies, one towards a plurality of idioms scattered among many different
social groups, the other towards hegemonic dominance by privileged groups. Each ten-
dency counteracts the other. The relative strength of hegemonic idioms in a given society
is the result of this dialectic.

Reflexive Struggle and the Politics of Deliberation

The idea of hegemonic idioms in deliberation foretells dangers of political marginalization
in a particularly acute way. People who do not speak or act as natives in a hegemonic idiom
are disadvantaged relative to those who do. They seem less competent, less persuasive, less
convincing. Correspondingly, they internalize this incompetence when participating in
politics, becoming more likely to feel that their opinions are ill informed or not to have
opinions at all.
Such problems are multiplied when we consider this dynamic over time. The hegemonic
idiom tends to reproduce its own dominance. It provides its native practitioners with a
privileged status in politics. Because they correspond more closely to standards of
citizen competence, they are perceived as making the better argument. They are thus in a
position – knowingly or unknowingly, strategically or innocently – to perpetuate the same
norms. By dominating the field of deliberation, they are much more likely to valorize and
perpetuate their own ideas of deliberative competence.
Deliberative democracy is frequently put forward as a solution to such problems. This is
particularly true of the Habermasian view, which emphasizes the universalizing presuppo-
sitions I discussed above. According to this view, norms of equality and reciprocity are
already present in political argumentation, and can be drawn on as normative leverage
against unequal, non-reciprocal forms of interaction. They provide a basis for making claims
against marginalization and exclusion (Habermas, 1996, pp. 107–11, pp. 420–7; 1998b,
pp. 203–36; 2006, pp. 17–8; compare Alexy, 1989, pp. 191–5). People can draw on the
implicit background presuppositions of speech to make claims about justice – claims that
dominant groups have already implicitly endorsed by entering into dialogue (Habermas,
1987, pp. 296–301; 2003, pp. 256–66). Consistency would require dominant groups to make
good on these presuppositions, treating marginalized compatriots as equals. According to
this view, a self-consistent practice of deliberative democracy would have to acknowledge
that the hegemonic idiom privileges some voices at the expense of others. Rectifying this
situation would require a conscious critique of the implicit norms of citizen competence,
broadening them to legitimate other idioms and forms of speech (Young, 2000, ch. 3). In
this case, the universalizing presuppositions of political discourse would provide a basis for
criticizing political marginalization.
The key question, however, is whether this kind of discursive strategy could be effective in
blunting the effects of social patterning. The point is particularly important because in this
approach dialogue about marginalization must take place in the same milieu – the same
social context, with all of its contending presuppositions – in which marginalization occurs.
Can marginalized people, whose claims are (to some extent) delegitimized because they are
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not properly articulated in the hegemonic idiom, make claims about the unfairness of their
very situation? This would require people to struggle over the public standards of delib-
eration within the actual tumult of real political interaction. Because this strategy construes
politics ex hypothesi as deliberative, it requires people to make political claims about how
deliberation should proceed, who is competent and how we should determine what
competence means.

We see that this purely deliberative strategy has a self-referential structure. It is deliberation
about the internal, social dynamics of deliberation. This is an example of what I have
elsewhere called reflexive democracy (Olson, 2006; 2009). It is democracy about democ-
racy, a political process in which people have to assert and defend their own political agency
through politics itself. This particular situation is reflexive in two senses. First, as a whole it
involves deliberation about deliberation. Deliberative democracy becomes a public forum
for discussing itself, reflecting back on the social bases and inherent tensions of its own
practice. Second, from the perspective of subordinated individuals, this is an incomplete,
frustrated reflexivity. It is one in which people struggle to legitimate their own agency,
trying to gain more completely reflexive control over the bases of that agency. They must
do this, however, by employing some already hegemonic idiom, one that contributes to
their own marginalization.

The irony of the situation is captured precisely in the disjunction between these two senses
of reflexivity. When deliberative democracy is put forward as a solution to problems of
marginalization within deliberative democracy, its social patterning poses substantial prob-
lems for people who speak in devalued idioms. They face a difficult task of translation in
renegotiating the terms of deliberation or changing the dominant definitions of their own
competence. In this case, they are forced to use the same communicative means that
subordinate them to fight that subordination. The difficulty, of course, is that a hegemonic
idiom is one used in its native form by dominant groups. It cannot be employed at will by
just anyone who might try to appropriate it. Rather, it is a mode of communication that
favors certain identities at the expense of others.

Here the hegemonic character of dominant idioms poses a particular challenge. When a
particular set of speech norms is taken as ‘correct’, others, which may simply be different
because they are the norms of other groups, are implicitly coded as ‘incorrect’. Social
difference is reinterpreted as incompetence – a failure to speak and act correctly, rather
than a simple difference in norms of speaking and acting. Facing connotations of failure
and incompetence, the symbolic challenge to marginalized groups is a substantial one.
They must make a public case that the accepted, ‘legitimate’ standards of political speech
should be broadened to include idioms normally termed signs of failure and incompe-
tence. They must overcome the stigma and delegitimation of their own idiom to argue
for its legitimation. And they must make this argument within or in contrast to hege-
monic idioms themselves. This task is difficult because of the dilemma it poses: to
legitimate oneself either by using a dominant idiom poorly as a non-native speaker, or
a stigmatized idiom well as a native speaker. Either choice can be considered a sign of
incompetence.
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The Limits of Deliberation and Its Place in the Political

So far my article foretells a dark future for deliberative democracy. The forms of margin-
alization operating within political discourse seem to short-circuit claims that people could
make to struggle against their own disadvantage. Implicit, differentiating presuppositions
undermine implicit forms of discursive universalism that might counteract them. Moreover,
there is no easy way to tell which presuppositions might really hold sway in a given domain.
Both universalist and differentiating ones are held to be implicit in practice, but these
assessments are fallible conclusions drawn through social scientific interpretation. Such
inferences may not accurately reconstruct the practices in question.We can conclude, then,
that universality and differentiation exist in tension with one another, and it is not at all clear
which way the balance would tip.
We have already determined that a philosophically rigorous, pure form of deliberation
about deliberation cannot solve the problems I have detailed.We might ask, then, whether
some hybrid or impure alternative might fare better. One conclusion that can be drawn
with confidence is that such a resolution cannot be accomplished through purely theo-
retical means. The balance of contending presuppositions is a contextually specific one
whose outcome is in turn contingent on the specific political cultures involved, the actual
claims advanced in dialogue, and the kinds of claims that actual people find convincing
given their social, cultural and historical background. The outcome is, in other words, both
contingent and uncertain. It can be determined only within actual politics.
This does not mean that we have nothing left to say about the matter from a theoretical
perspective, however. We can inquire in more detail what deliberation about deliberation
would look like: what its limits and points of difficulty might be, what challenges would
likely await those actually undertaking such discussions. Rather than framing deliberation
as an eternally self-referential struggle for dominance among unequal groups, we can
examine the form that deliberation about deliberation might take. This would provide a
valuable reflection both on the potential and limitations of deliberation to resolve its own
problems from within.
This strategy helps avoid false diagnoses of insurmountable antinomies or overly stylized
dilemmas that would come from conducting this discussion in a purely theoretical register.
It takes the sharp philosophical edge off the contrast drawn above between universalizing
and differentiating presuppositions, viewing them as contextual and contingent character-
istics of various deliberative regimes. Universalizing and differentiating presuppositions may
or may not be manifested in actual political cultures, and they are only held to be implicit
in practice based on fallible, epistemically limited interpretations. Any philosophical con-
clusion that deliberative democracy is inherently doomed – or serenely unproblematic – is
thus premature. Instead, the insights marshaled here suggest that we should try to discern
such tendencies in actually existing politics and make some useful contribution to clarifying
the political situation.
Clearly, the problems I have examined call for a critical rethinking of deliberative politics.
This approach must acknowledge that each deliberative regime poses contextually specific
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challenges. It should trace the conditions under which hegemonic idioms could best be
contested, either in deliberation or through broader political means. Such a critical under-
standing would shed light on the political task itself, seeking to identify conditions under
which people would be able to take political action against their own political marginal-
ization. It would look for paths of opportunity and points of blockage as forms of political
praxis on the part of the people contesting deliberative hegemonies. In what follows, I will
outline four considerations for such a critical understanding. They do not seek to replace
actual politics, but try to illuminate its challenges and limitations.

Actually Existing Universality

A first consideration asks how permeable a given regime might be to change through
deliberation itself. This is the question of whether deliberative marginalization is contest-
able in its own terms. Can deliberation be the solution to problems arising within
deliberation? To investigate this, we need to ask how hegemonic a regime’s dominant
idioms actually are. This particularly depends on how easily non-dominant forms of
expression and argumentation can be recognized as legitimate. The more fluid the standards
of legitimacy, the greater the chances that marginalized groups might legitimate their own
competencies and idioms.
One way of answering this question takes the claims of deliberative democracy seriously
and uses them as a basis for making claims against deliberative marginalization. For this to
work – for it to escape self-defeating forms of self-referentiality – people must be able to
make claims within the deliberative context that are heard and understood. This implies that
the norms of equality and inclusion that theorists claim to find implicit in practices are
really there. People must be able to make persuasive claims about equality and inclusion that
reverberate with the political culture of their society. Their fellow citizens must find these
claims intuitively plausible, describing presuppositions that they are in fact making and
would find binding on their conduct. These ‘implicit’ norms must provide a sufficiently
forceful critique of the prevailing forms of differentiation. The question, then, is whether
such norms are compelling enough, against the background of the actual political culture,
to convince people to change their own thinking about politics, particularly what it means
to be a competent citizen. This hangs on the ways that such norms resonate with beliefs
that people already have and are prepared to act on.

Resistance to Reflexivity
A related concern is whether hegemony itself can be thematized in discourse. Here the issue
is one of actively discussing the social differences that pattern deliberation, making delib-
eration be about deliberation in the most directly reflexive sense. Unfortunately, Shawn
Rosenberg’s research suggests that such discourse is rare, at least in face-to-face deliberative
settings among the well-educated, reasonably affluent subjects that he studies (Rosenberg,
2007). Rosenberg observes that people seem strongly motivated to maintain social con-
sensus and cohesion during deliberation. To do this, they actively avoid turning discourse
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back on the discursive situation itself, finding greater comfort in more conventional, less
reflexive modes. They take great pains to preserve the social and deliberative status quo,
marginalizing, ridiculing or rejecting attempts to steer discussion on to a self-reflective level.
When people try to thematize the discussion itself, particularly problems of a deeper or
more systematic sort, conversation is forcibly redirected to leave the status quo unchal-
lenged. This reveals interesting and somewhat unexpected social limitations on the ability
of deliberative participants to thematize the deliberative context itself in discussion. The
source and pervasiveness of these tendencies remains to be further explored.What is clear,
though, is their tendency to short-circuit attempts to raise and resolve problems of
deliberation from within deliberation itself.

The Limits of Deliberation

These considerations suggest that deliberative democracy has both promise and very
tangible limits in resolving its own problems. Political claims about deliberative marginal-
ization themselves face marginalization in two senses: first, universalizing claims can be
delegitimated based on differentiating presuppositions about the people claiming them; and
second, deliberative participants can resist reflexive consideration of their own discourse.
Either of these characteristics, if present, would constitute a form of political closure. It
would help to entrench the status quo and prevent deliberative problems from being
deliberatively resolved. It would thus limit deliberation’s ability to function as an egalitarian,
inclusive practice.
The very possibility of such systematic marginalization, and the concomitant possibility that
such problems cannot be resolved deliberatively, reveal limits on deliberation itself. The
possibility of these problems implies that deliberation cannot be seen as a self-correcting
democratic practice with potentially unlimited application. It suggests very real limits on
the practice itself and what we can ask deliberation to do.
These limits are not imposed from outside. They arise within the practice as a result of
tensions between its universalizing and differentiating tendencies. Such tensions may be
resolvable in practice – they may be worked out in actual politics, so that claims can be
made about the injustice of deliberative marginalization – but the possibility that they cannot
reveals limits within the practice itself. This is not a necessary flaw or an inescapable
conclusion about deliberation. It is, rather, a prediction about what we can expect from this
genre of political practice and an acknowledgement of the limits that we must place on such
expectations.
This is above all an interpretive point. Both universalizing and differentiating presupposi-
tions are identified in a fallible, interpretive manner as features of actually existing practices.
The prediction of their tensions with one another and the difficulties of their political
resolution is a similar conclusion. It is made from a theorist’s perspective as a prediction
about the course of actual politics. When we say that deliberative practice has inherent
limits, then, this is a similar kind of statement. It is an interpretive conclusion about what
we can expect from deliberative democracy, what we can see as possible in deliberative
democracy as we understand it. In this case, interpretation suggests limits to what can be
accomplished through deliberative practice.
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Exit,Voice and the Political

The limits of deliberation force one to look outside the deliberative arena to resolve its
problems. When the claims of marginalized people are discounted as less competent, less
reliable or less valuable in deliberation, we want to know how effectively those claims can
be raised through other means. People may need to exit deliberation in order to achieve
political voice (compare Hirschman, 1970). Indeed, such a strategy is implied by the limits
of deliberation. It acknowledges that deliberation is situated within the political more
broadly, and that it can be replaced or supplemented by other modes of politics. Such
alternatives can constitute separate, parallel sites for political engagement. They can close
the reflexive loop in ways that deliberation itself cannot, circling back to reform practices
of deliberation. Here silenced claims and idioms can demand the hearing they have been
denied in deliberative arenas. This would provide alternative forms of voice for those not
able to contest deliberative marginalization in purely deliberative terms. Ironically, being
heard may require exiting discursive forms of political engagement, at least those that
depend on proceduralized forms of universality as the normative core of their practice.
Deliberative democracy is often portrayed as foreclosing and constraining politics, and thus
as opposed to the political in important ways. Here we see something rather different.
Deliberation appears as a form of the political, one with important advantages and
limitations. In this view deliberative democracy does not itself foreclose politics. Rather,
other social dynamics foreclose the promise of this political mode. In assessing deliberation,
then, we must realize that its procedural, universalist character is not (always) the problem.
In this light, we might consider ways of disaggregating universalization and differentiation,
or find other ways of rehabilitating deliberation rather than rejecting it out of hand.
One way to do this is by taking a broader view of the relation between deliberation and the
political. Here we are especially concerned with the structural fit between deliberation and
other political modalities: how easy it is to switch from one to another, how readily
capabilities in one translate to the other, how forcefully impediments in one impede
people’s agency in another. To some extent this is determined by the character of the
available alternatives. In particular, their immunity from differentiation – from perpetuating
problems similar to those of deliberation – is a key consideration. Also important are the
relative ease of exit and entry between deliberation and other possibilities. The more easily
one can switch between political modalities, or even better, combine them, the more
universalizing are their effects.
This strategy hinges on finding other modes of the political that do not have the same
problems plaguing deliberation. It bets that differentiating presuppositions have a particular
hold on deliberation as opposed to other forms of politics. This is a reasonable conclusion,
because deliberation relies much more heavily on the nuances of language and the public
presentation of reasons than do other political modalities. One way of parsing deliberation’s
problem is that it cannot successfully separate a ‘subjectless’ abstract politics of ideas
(Habermas, 1996, p. 184, p. 299, p. 361, p. 486) from a more immediate, socially patterned
‘politics of presence’ (Phillips, 1995). Even when reasons and ideas are deracinated from the
context in which they originate, their articulation still bears the linguistic and cultural
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18 KEVIN OLSON

marks of its differentiated origins. This matters, of course, because social patterning has a
subtle impact on the claims people are willing to accept. Rightly or wrongly, the identity
of the person making a claim is often an important heuristic for whether people believe it.
Because other political modalities operate differently, they are likely to be less susceptible to
such problems. The deliberative strategy and the more broadly political one operate on
different normative premises. The deliberative strategy relies on norms held to be implicit
in communication. It banks on the resonance that such claims will have with norms already
implicit in our own political practices. The more broadly political strategy takes a different
tack. Rather than stipulate principles of equality and inclusion that would condemn social
differentiation, this strategy is silent about the kinds of normative claim that should count
in the public sphere. It does not try to discern implicit norms of political practice. Rather,
it emphasizes politics while leaving normativity up to the people actually involved.When
claims of equality and inclusion do not get traction, a resort to pure politics, making
whatever claims one finds appropriate, may be a more fruitful path.
Deliberation’s limits reveal important insights about its relation to politics in the broader
sense.We see that these limits imply a need for other avenues of political action. Deliberative
politics cannot stand alone; it must be seen as part of a broader palette of political
possibilities.While this practice undoubtedly gains energy from its internal tensions, it also
requires an ‘outside’ – other modalities of political interaction – for negotiating them. This
conclusion comes from considering the deeper tensions within deliberation itself – the way
universalization and differentiation oppose one another within deliberative practice. It is an
effort to predict fault-lines of actual politics, and is not, as it might seem, an argument
against deliberation. This conclusion cautions us that deliberation is both a part of the
political and needs this broader field of possibilities to realize its own aims.

Conclusion
This article challenges deliberative theorists to take better account of the complex social
texture of deliberative interaction. I have tried to show that deliberative politics is criss-
crossed by presuppositions of all kinds – some tending towards universalized forms of
practice, others towards differentiating assessments of fellow citizens. These countervailing
tendencies reveal tensions within deliberation itself.
I have resisted the temptation to force a false resolution of this dilemma from a theoretical
perspective. Theory cannot decide the matter on its own. At the same time, it is premature
to conclude that theorists must withdraw from the field, renouncing their credentials to say
anything useful about the dilemma. I have argued that we must give more careful consid-
eration to the political processes in which such dilemmas are finessed and/or perpetuated.
This is a ‘politics about politics’: a matter of reckoning with the reflexive character of
deliberative democracy, the self-referential status of citizens within it, and the need to think
simultaneously about the promise and limits of deliberation as they are balanced in tension
with one another.
The way these tensions are worked out has everything to do with the critical potential of
deliberation: the extent to which it acts as a means of promoting equality and inclusion,
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allowing people to see one another from viewpoints other than their own, or the extent to
which it reproduces subtle forms of social classification and differentiation. Our notions of
who is qualified to speak and how valuable their contributions are reflect deep currents of
power and disadvantage in society as a whole. If deliberative democracy is going to live up
to its advertised potential as an emancipatory, equalizing solution to these problems, it must
avoid perpetuating them at the same time. This requires deliberative theorists to acknowl-
edge the limits of deliberation and forge connections with other political modalities,
without backing away from their own distinctive claims about the promise of a linguistic
turn in political practice.
(Accepted: 24 April 2010)

About the Author

Kevin Olson is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of
Reflexive Democracy: Political Equality and the Welfare State (MIT Press, 2006) and editor of Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy
Fraser Debates Her Critics (Verso, 2008). His work has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal
of Politics, Constellations, the Journal of Political Philosophy and other journals and books. In 2006–7 he was an Erasmus
Mundus Scholar at Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Kevin Olson, Department of Political Science, University of California, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA
92697-5100, USA; email: kevin.olson@uci.edu

Note
This article is part of the collaborative project ‘Political Conflict and Deliberative Competence: The Contested Preconditions for
Democratic Citizenship’, supported by a grant from the University of California–Utrecht University Collaborative Research Program.
I have benefited from extensive discussions with my collaborators Joel Anderson, Bert van den Brink and Shawn Rosenberg. I am also
very grateful for insightful comments from Daniel Brunstetter, James Fishkin, Robert Goodin, Nikolas Kompridis, Anthony Laden,
Kirstie McClure and the anonymous reviewers.

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