deliberation to the traditional ‘‘Wction of a mass assembly carrying out its
deliberations’’ in the form of one concrete uniWed body or institution. The
concretistic and overly unitarian ‘‘Wction of a general deliberative assembly’’
fails to capture the properly pluralistic character of deliberation (Benhabib
1996 , 73 ). In undertaking this political translation of Habermas’ deliberative
model, Benhabib is simply following Habermas himself, whoseBetween Facts
and Norms( 1996 ) similarly announces the death of historically anachronistic
ideas of a sovereign democratic macro-subject, in which society is conceived
as a uniWed ‘‘body’’ or collective subject; Habermas repeatedly scolds trad-
itional democratic thinkers for endorsing overly concretistic interpretations
of the normative ideal of popular sovereignty. The original theoretical inspir-
ation for Benhabib’s reXections is replete with references to the anonymous
and even ‘‘subject-less character’’ of lively deliberative politics (Habermas
1996 , 136 ). Parallel descriptions of an anonymous deliberative civil society
are now commonplace in the critical theory literature.
AtWrst glance, this translation seems harmless enough. Popular sovereignty
has indeed been interpreted in many unconvincing ways in modern political
thought. Who could persuasively claim that a single deliberative legislature
can either legitimately or eVectively ‘‘stand-in’’ for a pluralistic people and the
‘‘plurality of associations’’ they employ? 8 Habermas and his followers rightly
praise the virtues of a vibrant civil society and lively process of deliberation in
which ideas and arguments ‘‘move’’ and ‘‘Xow’’ in an unpredictable and even
anarchic fashion, and they understandably celebrate, in a postmodern spirit,
the death of anachronistic ideas of a unitary sovereign macro-subject as the
proper carrier of democracy. They are also right to oVer aproceduralist
reading of the idea of popular sovereignty (Habermas 1996 , 287 – 328 ). Given
this starting point, the appeal of such terms as anonymous and subject-less
seems obvious. As we all know from the practical discourses in which we
unavoidably engage, it often remains unclear who initiated a speciWc argu-
ment or to whom it ‘‘belongs.’’ Many times we simply do not care: lively
argumentative give-and-take can seem anonymous and even subject-less
because fruitful deliberation often Xows in complex and unexpected
ways. We may be more interested in the practical resolution of whatever
8 To be sure, this argument has something of a straw man quality to it. Defenders of a simple
parliamentary model of rule—the obvious target of Benhabib’s comments—are few and far between
today. In an important critique of Habermas’ own formulations of this argument, Ingeborg Maus
argues plausibly that this criticism rests on a caricature of the classical theory of popular sovereignty
articulated most clearly by the Enlightenment theorists Rousseau and Kant (Maus 1992 ; 1996 , 874 – 5 ).
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