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This essay traces the interconnections between the rhetoric and actuality of Barthes’s proclaimed inability to choose between the polarised forms of the Album and the Livre, the fragmentary ‘note’ of the Diary and the all-embracing Novel. Barthes’s public rehearsal of this indecision, which takes place in the pedagogical context of his lecture course La Préparation du roman, is structured as the theatrical ‘deliberation’ of the writer faced with the obligation to choose. Yet Barthes underlines the appeal of thinking in terms of simplified alternatives, and leaves the formal decision hanging in the balance. I read this artificially constructed deliberation in conjunction with his analysis of Saint Ignatius’s Exercices spirituels, where a new language through which to solicit God’s will is elaborated through the theatrical preparation of an ‘election’. The symbiotic relation that Barthes identifies between Ignatius’s pedagogical Exercices and the personal Journal spirituel – in which Ignatius charts the progress of a practical election – takes me to the relation between Barthes’s Préparation du roman and his own private diaries. His 1979 essay ‘Délibération’ combines a general question (can a Diary be Literature?) with a practical issue to be resolved: should Barthes keep a diary with a view to publication?  

This chapter establishes the historical and scholarly context of Peculiar Rhetoric. Colonizationists sought to provide a middle ground between abolition and the status quo practice of slavery. The discourse that emerged provides insights into the nuances and fissures of racial identity in antebellum America. The concept of peculiar rhetoric draws from the scholarship on African American rhetoric, diaspora, and deliberation.

The creation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) marked the beginning of a concentrated effort to gain federal support for colonization. Examination of the context surrounding the formation of ACS and the speeches delivered at its founding reveals the peculiar argumentation of the group. Such argumentation was marked by its inability to resolve central tensions between many of the key audiences.

In response to the creation of the American Colonization Society, a Counter Memorial against the group was published by a purported group of free blacks in the District of Columbia. The exact authorship was called into question by the editors in the paper. This chapter uses the Counter Memorial and the question of authorship to explore the instability of voice as it pertained to blackness and colonization.

This chapter explains the concept of democratic deliberation and considers its implications for ethical review of human subjects research. Democratic deliberation is an ethical principle relatively new to research ethics. It involves a public exchange of ideas within and across groups of ordinary citizens, experts, and political representatives, and requires participants to engage actively with one another, to offer reasons that are acceptable and intelligible to their interlocutors, and to revise their decisions as new information and new perspectives come into view.Incorporating democratic deliberation into human subjects research would recommend greater inclusion of participants in the review process. This might be achieved by seating participants or their advocates on IRBs, and by otherwise involving them on advisory committees overseeing research. Such inclusion of research participants would follow the model of advisory committees elsewhere in the health care system, which include patients and other stakeholders. It would also counsel against exempting public benefits research, such as experimentation with Medicare and Medicaid benefits, from ethical review.

The arguments for the unavoidability of administrative discretion are both political and functional. Administrative structures are a practical inevitability in modern environmental governance; no citizenry or legislature has the insight, vision, cognitive assets, or time to create, much less administer, all the rules likely to be judged desirable by a collective will. But administrative discretion must be subjected to democratic control in any system of popular governance. The aim should not be to render government less effective but to render citizens’ control over government more effective, by building new forms of participation and new deliberative arenas into the decisionmaking processes of administration. The problems posed by administrative discretion for global environmental governance are not so much institutional and procedural as they are normative and political.

This chapter takes a look at the relationship between provisionalism and democratic theory. The task given to provisional democratic theory is to investigate what factors and conditions make the principle of affected interest possible. This principle refers to the notion that the people that are affected by certain policies should have a say in their formation and implementation. The chapter then moves on to discuss how deliberative democratic theory came about through the promotion of Deliberation Day by Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. The chapter analyzes the flaws in deliberative democracy and how these flaws affect issues such as sex discrimination, affirmative action, property rights, and freedom of speech. It looks particularly at Cass R. Sunstein's The Partial Constitution and its understandings on status quo neutrality.

Deliberation is a mental action performed with the end of determining what to think or do. Because it is an action, deliberation is undertaken for (better or worse) reasons. Thus, it cannot be what makes it true that actions are performed for (better or worse) reasons, on pain of regress and other problems. Instead, deliberation is made possible by nondeliberative, nonreflective, nonvoluntary capacities to act for reasons.

If deliberation is not what makes it possible to think or act for reasons, a question arises: what is the role of deliberation? The role of deliberation is to enhance pre-existing but imperfect capacities to think and act for reasons independently of deliberation. Deliberation contingently, typically assists human beings in overcoming imperfections such as difficulties accessing stored information, difficulties chaining together simple inferences and insights, difficulties overcoming distractions, and others. An extended example shows how capacities to think and act for reasons independently of deliberation can be deployed in the process of deliberation itself to overcome the imperfections and, when all goes well, improve what is thought or done.

This chapter sets out the aim of the book—to examine systematically deliberation on monetary policy in the U.S. in two different institutions, the Federal Reserve and Congress. It establishes reasons why deliberation may matter in US monetary policy. For instance, even though the legal framework for the independence of the Fed has remained constant, (1) interpretations of this independence among policy makers and politicians have changed considerably — and so it may be important to gauge how their thinking and arguments on this have evolved; (2) policy makers do not generally envisage their decisions on monetary policy as falling along a single dimension, and so there are potential trade-offs to be made across dimensions, which may entail argued reasoning; (3) the uncertainty inherent to monetary policy decision making creates questions that in turn create the opportunity for deliberation; (4) studying the Fed and Congress together allows us insight into the ways in which each institutional setting shapes the ways that monetary policy is understood and discussed; and (5) studying deliberation provides insight into the effects of changes in transparency and the chairman’s leadership on the committees’ discussions.

This chapter briefly surveys the difficulties in measuring empirically the motivations of members of congressional committees and the FOMC. It challenges the bias against the empirical investigation of political “talk”, and particularly deliberation within committee settings. Deliberation is defined as exhibiting the important characteristic of reason-giving, so that deliberative discourse would entail members of the FOMC and legislators providing reasons for their positions, and responding to those of others. Ultimately, then, members must be willing to be persuaded by the merits of their colleagues’ reasoned argument. This chapter sets out a number of hypotheses for what we might expect to find within FOMC and congressional committee deliberation, with attention given to the effects of key institutional and ideational features that may affect deliberation—e.g., committee rules and procedures, transparency, clarity of the policy objective, and the degree of consensus surrounding the role of monetary policy in the economy.

Deliberation is an understudied area of policy-making, in part because it is a challenging task. First, it is hard to reduce words into a measurable form while maintaining the integrity of the concepts and arguments. Second, even if we can capture the content of deliberation in a more systematic fashion that preserves meaning, we face the question of how we then assess whether and how deliberation makes a difference. This book finds that deliberation matters because it can change the views and preferences of participants, and these changes can in turn result in both abrupt policy consequences (e.g., the Volcker Revolution) and longer term policy consequences (e.g., cementing a legislative consensus around the primacy of low inflation as a precursor to stable economic growth). Simply put, deliberation matters in a process where policy is made in a committee setting because committee members (1) seek to persuade others to alter their views and (2) are themselves persuaded to revise their own views. The views of committee members are malleable. Thus, it is not satisfactory to assess policymaking using just a crude measurement of preferences in a statistical framework.

The concept of consent, part of the traditional “holy trinity” is analysed. This chapter argues that consent is best understood not as a one-time agreement, but as an ongoing process (in line with much contemporary thought). Approaches to consent that focus on an agreement by the host nation government are morally dangerous, as peacekeepers operate where institutions are not in place to allow any formal government to embody the desires or interests of the political community as a whole.

Constitutions attempt to secure important social benefits by establishing fundamental laws, mandating the rule of law, entrenching political procedures, limiting government powers, and, in liberal orders, guaranteeing basic human rights. Entrenched constitutional provisions organize government, vest governing officials with necessary powers, structure politics, enable government to make credible commitments to investors and foreign powers, facilitate coordination between subnational governing units, prevent self-dealing by governing officials, promote deliberation on the public interest, offer some insurance against uncertain futures, articulate national aspirations, and foster compromises among persons who disagree on national aspirations. The Constitution of the United States proposes to help Americans secure national union, social peace, commercial prosperity, and various liberal rights.

This chapter examines a moment when the literary avant-garde returned to diary-writing and the writing subject, by focusing on Roland Barthes’s experiments with the diary (journal intime). These experiments take place in the context of his project for a ‘Vita Nova’ (seeking a unification of his life and writing, and a new, subjective form of literature), and are all related to his mourning for his mother. His Journal de deuil (written 1977–1979) pursues an impossible ideal of diary-writing, in which a univocal, fully present writing subject expresses a valuable interior experience to produce a literary œuvre. The impossibility of this ideal leads Barthes to his reflections on the diary in the article ‘Délibération’, and then to an almost perfectly opposite form of diary-writing project, with Soirées de Paris. These two diaries, exploring opposite extremes of writing, are placed by Barthes as components within his imagined novel (Vita Nova).

Virtually all of our knowledge is second-hand, learned from others. In ideal deliberative settings, such as Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’, learning from others works well because participants are challenged to provide evidence and be consistent in their arguments. Not all real-world deliberation lives up to such high standards, but even non-ideal deliberation can be epistemically advantageous. We investigate five ways how: by improving voter competence; by reducing positive correlation; by incentivizing more sincere voting; by making the decision problem more truth-conducive; and by changing the decision problem in epistemically beneficial ways. The chapter ends with the conjecture that the ‘Deliberation Effect’ will boost group competence at least a little.

On the face of it, direct democracy should outperform representative democracy based on the number of voters. If, however, the electorate is better at selecting representatives than policies (the Selection Effect) or if the deliberation feasible among representatives leads to epistemic gains (the Deliberation Effect), then representative democracy may be preferable. Another factor is whether representatives act as delegates or trustees. If the former, the epistemic loss from bunching voters into constituencies is minimal. If the latter, the much smaller number of voters may be compensated for by the ability to deliberate among trustees. A mix of delegates and trustees can possibly benefit from both Selection and Deliberation Effects.