Most lovers of truth find democratic elections rather hard to stomach. So many words, so much sound, so much fury—so little effort to improve our understanding of who we are and where we stand in the world. Periodic elections ensure that democracy remains, among other things, “an aristocracy of orators,” since they hand the greatest powers to those who have mastered—or purchased—the arts of persuasion rather than to those who make the best arguments.1 They provide an extraordinarily exciting spectacle for political junkies and journalists, the type of people whom Plato takes pleasure in deriding as “lovers of mere sights and sounds.”2 But they cannot help but disturb those who are committed, like Plato’s philosophers, to using arguments to gain a better understanding of the way things are.
We students of democracy, political theorists, social scientists, and moral philosophers alike, are at least in this sense heirs to Plato’s philosophers. We are by profession, and often by character and conviction, lovers of truth. We are trained and, hopefully, inclined to “want to understand who we are, to correct error, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to get beyond comfortable falsehood.”3 Even when, like so many contemporary philosophers, we deny our access to any accurate, objective account of the truth, we are compelled to do so by our desire to dispel familiar illusions about the way things are.4
But unlike lovers of truth in past ages, most of us are inclined by habit and convention, and often by character and conviction, to be democrats as well. As a result, we face a problem few of our predecessors ever had to confront: the tension between moral commitments to democratic politics and intellectual commitments to dispelling illusion and seeking the truth about the way things are. Like all lovers of truth, we are quite uncomfortable with democratic rhetoric and the whole spectacle of democratic elections. But unlike most of our predecessors, we feel uneasy about this discomfort, given our own democratic commitments and loyalties. This uneasiness draws us toward theories that promise to reconcile our political and intellectual commitments, for example, by reconstructing the democratic polity as a “great community” of inquirers, or by reinterpreting Socratic dialectic as a kind of democratic engagement, or by reimagining democratic deliberation as the exchange and examination of opinions rather than the rhetorical competition we have now.5
In this paper I argue that these efforts to eliminate the tension between our commitments to democracy and the love of truth end up doing a disservice to both. For they tend, on the one hand, to undermine the legitimacy of democratic decision making and, on the other, to subordinate the search for truth to the search for some form of mutual accommodation.
I develop this argument by means of a critique of the most elaborate and influential attempt to reconcile our commitments to democracy and the love of truth: the vision of democratic deliberation inspired by the theories of Habermas and Rawls. The advocates of this “strong version” of deliberative democracy eliminate the tension between these commitments by adapting their understanding of each to fit the other.6 They begin by adopting the understanding of moral truth, developed especially by Habermas, according to which valid and objectively binding moral claims are the product of something like an idealized process of democratic deliberation. Then they reimagine democracy as a set of practices that seeks, as far as possible, to institutionalize this process of deliberation. I shall argue, however, that they can revise our understanding of democracy and the search for truth in these ways only by conflating the political legitimacy of democratic decisions with their moral justification. They reconcile our commitments to democracy and the love of truth by making sure that democracies “embody the idealized content of a form of practical reason.”7 But they can do so only because they have already made the search for moral and political truth embody something like the idealized content of a form of democratic deliberation.
I conclude that if we are genuinely committed to both democracy and the love of truth, we need to learn how to live with the tension between them. The vain search for means of harmonizing them diverts energy and attention from this important task.
Why does rhetoric, speech that aims at persuasion rather than the exchange and examination of information and opinions, dominate public reasoning in democracies? Why does democracy always seem to turn into something like Hobbes’s “aristocracy of orators”? Because, as Michael Walzer suggests, the democratic principle of popular consent requires that “the citizen who makes the most persuasive argument—that is, the argument that actually persuades the largest number of citizens—gets [or should get] his way.”8 In order to attain even the most public-spirited ends in a democratic polity, you need to find a way of bringing a majority of people to your side. Rhetoric, as Aristotle suggests, is the art that identifies the available means of persuasion in any given situation.9 In order to succeed in a democracy you need master the art of rhetoric or make use of the services of people who have done so. Democracy becomes, among other things, an aristocracy of orators because it seeks, not the elimination of political inequality, but the elimination of wealth, knowledge, good birth, and all other qualities except the ability to persuade the public as a legitimate qualification to unequal political influence and authority.
We tend to take for granted this consequence of the principle of popular consent, even if we do not especially like it. But this principle structures democratic deliberation in ways that, unlike the principle itself, are far from obvious. In particular, it introduces an asymmetry between speakers and voters that extends and deepens the role of rhetoric in democratic deliberation.
Voters, unlike the speakers who try to persuade them, do not have to give an account of their actions and character. They need not explain why or, where there is a secret ballot, even how they voted. And even if they do give an account of their reasons for voting, nothing they say diminishes the legitimacy of their vote. They may have chosen to vote for the best-dressed candidate or for the policy with the silliest sounding name. But that does not make their vote count any less than those cast by people who carefully weighed the virtues of competing candidates and platforms. For with regard to his vote, “the voter is sovereign, in the old and narrow sense of the word. He could rightly adopt the motto of absolutist rulers and say: ‘Sic volo, sic jubeo, stat pro ratione voluntas’ (‘thus I wish, I ordain, my will takes the place of reason’.)”10 Arbitrary power, if very narrowly circumscribed, survives in democracies in the democratic voter’s equally distributed power over his or her vote. “One person, one vote” means that each citizen’s vote carries the same weight as any other’s, no matter how he or she chooses to use it. To challenge a voter’s use of the franchise is to challenge the principle of democratic legitimacy itself. For it would suggest that we may measure the legitimacy of a democratic vote by something other than the choices of democratic voters.
This very narrowly circumscribed sovereignty of democratic voters over their votes helps shape the practice of democratic deliberation as we have come to know it. Far from a process of mutual accountability, it is an asymmetrical process in which some people seek the approval of the general pool of voters for candidates and their proposals. To gain this approval they have to render persuasive accounts of their choices and their virtues—even if only, like Coriolanus, by showing the public their wounds—to a public that never has to account for their own choices and virtues. The persuasiveness of these appeals is determined, as in all forms of rhetoric, by the decisions made by the people who hear them,11 not by any intrinsic quality of the arguments that they make. So rather than analyze and correct commonly held premises, democratic speakers rely on these premises as the foundation of their arguments. And rather than spell out clearly the ways their proposals depart from currently held beliefs, they introduce changes as means of preserving already valued practices. The former is often denounced as pandering, the latter as manipulation. But the use of these rhetorical tools follows from the need to find ways of appealing to a voting public that is not held accountable to any standard for how it exercises its votes.12 Ironically, it is the sovereignty of voters over their votes that turns democracy into an aristocracy of orators.
Moreover, by focusing so exclusively on popular consent as the source of political legitimacy, modern democracies have extended and deepened their reliance on persuasive speech. In Athens the great majority of public offices were distributed by lot rather than by election, a system that removed the selection of officials from the reach of the rhetorical competition that dominated the rest of Athenian public life. But modern democracies have abandoned the reliance on lotteries for all but the selection of juries, and they have done so because it violates the principle of popular consent that sustains their legitimacy, and not just because of its inconvenience in such large political communities.13 We seem unwilling to leave such important decisions as the selection of public officials to the luck of the draw. We demand the right to choose our officials, which means that in order to gain office candidates must find a way of persuading us of their virtues. The distribution of power and influence to the persuasive is a consequence, not a corruption, of the democratic principle of popular consent.
Unlike hereditary aristocrats, the members of democracy’s aristocracy of orators must be willing to submit themselves and their proposals to an unaccountable power—and be willing to take no for an answer. If, like Coriolanus, they are unwilling to do so, there is no room for them in this aristocracy, despite their manifest virtues and record of public service. They almost always begin with superior resources—rhetorical ability, political experience, wealthy friends, media advisers, pollsters, advertisers, hair stylists, and so on—that increase their effectiveness in persuading their listeners. And if successful, they are raised to positions of authority that the vast majority of their listeners will never approach. But in order to get from one place to the other, to transform their unequal resources into unequal authority, they have to submit their arguments to the unaccountable judgment of voters, which means they need “to pay attention to their fellow citizens and display a certain respect for their points of view and judgment.”14 As a result, even the most Machiavellian, manipulative speakers must defer to some extent to popular needs and sentiments in order to be successful in a democracy.
The prominence of rhetoric in democratic deliberation thus bespeaks rather than betrays a form of democratic accountability. But it does so in a way that is far from reassuring to the lover of truth. For the feature of rhetorical speech that establishes its affinity for democracy, deference to the judgment of listeners, also creates serious impediments to the search for truth. Judges who are protected from rendering an account of their judgments are unlikely to refine their understanding of things. Speakers who need to find ways of bringing over a majority of unaccountable judges to their side will rely upon the most widely shared opinions. As a result, democratic deliberation tends to perpetuate and extend the errors embedded in received opinion rather than refine and correct them. It may compel Machiavellian schemers to stoop to conquer, since they cannot manipulate the public unless they are ready to defer or pander to them in some way. But the gain in accountability seems to be purchased at a rather high price for any lover of truth.
If rhetoric’s dominance of democratic deliberation is a product of the basic democratic principle of popular consent, then we are going to need a new understanding of democratic legitimacy in order to eliminate the tension between democracy and the love of truth. And that is precisely what the more ambitious advocates of deliberative democracy offer us.15 Seyla Benhabib, for example, argues that “legitimacy in complex democratic societies must be thought to result from the free and unconstrained public deliberation of all about matters of common concern.”16 Josh Cohen insists that “free deliberation among equals is the basis of legitimacy,” that the basic institutions of a democracy are “legitimate insofar as they establish the framework for free public deliberation.”17 And Jürgen Habermas accounts for the “legitimating force” of democratic institutions by suggesting that “democratic procedure makes it possible for issues and contributions, information and reason to float freely; it secures a discursive character for political will-formation; and it thereby grounds the fallibilist assumption that results from proper procedure are more or less reasonable.”18 According to this understanding of democracy, “political choice, to be legitimate, must be the outcome of deliberation about ends among free, equal, and rational agents.”19 It is the process of discussion and mutual accountability that legitimates democratic decisions, rather than the number of votes that a particular candidate or proposal receives. Popular consent and all the more familiar democratic institutions derive their legitimacy from the support they lend to a free and open discussion of issues among equals. A democracy, understood in this way, is “an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members.”20
This new understanding of democratic legitimacy, as well as the alternative vision of democratic deliberation that it sustains, is clearly inspired by the approach to moral justification developed by Rawls and, especially, by Habermas. Indeed it is hard to imagine the recent wave of interest in deliberative democracy in the absence of these powerful new theories about the source of moral truths.21 By encouraging us to think about justifiable moral principles as the product of a process of deliberation that ensures that we reason as “free, equal, and rational agents,” Rawls and Habermas opened the door to a new way of thinking about democratic deliberation and legitimacy. As Rawls and Habermas would have us justify moral claims by imagining the results of a hypothetical or idealized process of deliberation, so their followers ask us to justify the exercise of collective power by the degree to which it succeeds in institutionalizing this ideal of deliberation among equals. Their “ideal deliberative procedure provides a model for [democratic] institutions, a model that they should mirror, so far as possible.”22
Understood in this way, democratic deliberation seems to offer little to disturb the lover of truth. In place of the asymmetry between unaccountable voters and the aristocracy of orators who compete for their approval, we get a process of discussion in which we all hold each other accountable for our choices. In place of persuasive speech, with its ever-present combination of pandering and manipulation, we get the mutual exchange and examination of reasons. Moreover, since this ideal of democratic deliberation is based on a deliberative understanding of moral justification, the search for moral truth will proceed along a path similar to that trod by participants in the democratic process. It seems tailor-made to ease the tension between our commitments to democracy and the love of truth.
The problem with this new understanding of democratic legitimacy, and with the reconciliation that it makes possible, is that it is hard to conceive of how public deliberation can “govern” our affairs in the absence of some rule, like majority rule or unanimity, which brings it to a determinate and authoritative conclusion. Deliberative democrats like to contrast deliberative and aggregative approaches to collective decision making, the mutual exchange of opinions with the mere counting of individual votes.23 But by itself public deliberation decides nothing. We need to invoke some authoritative decision rule—wait for unanimity, follow the majority, obey the monarch, do what the oracle tells us to do—in order to recognize the results of public deliberation, let alone be governed by them. Public deliberation informs and prepares such decisions, as do other nondeliberative processes such as bargaining, polling, and consulting oracles. But it cannot make these decisions and thus cannot “govern” our affairs.
Cohen, like most deliberative democrats, recognizes the problem and acknowledges that even in the most ideal conditions voting will be required to bring public deliberation to a determinate and authoritative conclusion. But he insists that even if we have to rely on voting to end the process of deliberation, our doing so does not erase the profound difference between an aggregative and deliberative approach to democratic decision making.24 That is certainly true. A democratic process in which we simply count the preferences of isolated individuals will be very different from one in which there is an extended discussion of issues before a vote is taken. But by the same token, a deliberative process that we know will be decided by a majority rule vote will be very different from one that is unconstrained by such a decision rule, let alone one that we know will be ended only by the monarch’s fiat or by our reaching agreement. For when we know that an appeal to popular consent will end the deliberation, even, or perhaps especially the most responsible and public-spirited among us will be inclined to speak in ways that persuade others to do what we think is right. Similarly, we will argue in a very different and likely much less public manner when we know that the final decision will be made by an absolute monarch.
Habermas and his followers want, in effect, to separate out two spheres of public discourse: the highly rhetorical and asymmetric sphere of public discussion generated by voting and the free-floating exchange of opinion among equals in the larger community that lends legitimacy to the former. But ideas never float freely in democratic deliberation. They are deeply and inevitably shaped by our awareness of the audience that must be persuaded if they are ever to govern our affairs. There is therefore simply no way for democratic procedures to carve out a sphere that “secures a discursive [i.e., nonrhetorical] character for political will-formation.”25 On the contrary, the reliance on democratic decision rules ensures the prominence of rhetorical and asymmetric speech in our public deliberations.
The advocates of “strong” deliberative democracy avoid this conclusion and continue portraying democratic deliberation as a process of reason giving and mutual accountability by conflating the political legitimacy of democratic decisions with their moral justification. Political legitimacy, as they portray it, is something conferred by following a relatively democratic process of justification, and moral justification is something that we achieve by invoking an idealized vision of democratic decision making.
Ordinarily we make a strong and clear distinction between political legitimacy and moral justification, between the judgments that we recognize as authoritative and those that we recognize as morally sound or valid. Standards of political legitimacy usually tell us to whom we need to appeal, whom we have to persuade, in order to get the political community to endorse and enforce our judgments. Standards of moral justification tell us, in contrast, how to measure the validity of moral judgments, regardless of who is or is not persuaded by them. We develop standards of political legitimacy precisely so that we can act as a political community in the absence of shared and easily applied standards of moral justification. We may develop our standards of political legitimacy by invoking a particular mode of moral justification, say, by arguing that free and equal individuals in a state of nature or Rawlsian “original position” would, if rational, choose to accept only a democratic form of political authority. But even in this case, political legitimacy and moral justification refer to two different standards: the pedigree by which we recognize the right to speak for the community (some form of popular consent) and the process of reasoning that leads us to endorse that particular pedigree.
But the advocates of the strong version of deliberative democracy erase this clear and familiar distinction between moral justification and political legitimacy. Instead they treat political legitimacy as the more or less imperfect institutionalization of an ideal of moral justification.26 Benhabib writes, “According to the deliberative model of democracy, it is a necessary condition for attaining legitimacy and rationality with regard to collective decision making processes in a polity, that the institutions of this polity are so arranged that what is considered in the common interest of all results from processes of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly among free and equal individuals. The more collective decision-making processes approximate this model the greater their legitimacy and rationality.”27
Political legitimacy, understood in this way, measures the degree to which political institutions “approximate” the ideal conditions of deliberation relied upon to determine the validity of moral claims. It derives the pedigree of political authority from the same set of standards that determines their moral correctness. “More or less legitimate” therefore also means “more or less morally correct” in this understanding of political legitimacy, just as “more or less correct” means “more or less legitimate.” For political legitimacy, in this account, no longer refers to a threshold beyond which we recognize political decisions as authoritative for the community. It refers instead to the continuum of more or less justified moral claims that, it is suggested, supports the “presumption” of legitimacy that we make about democratic institutions.
Rewriting political legitimacy as “an ideal of justification” allows its advocates to construct a vision of democratic deliberation in which rhetoric is subordinated to the exchange and examination of opinions, in which we turn from rhetorical competition to a public search for the correct answers to questions of common concern. For, understood in this way, political legitimacy no longer refers us to the people who are authorized to decide how to end our deliberations, the majorities of unaccountable voters whom democratic speakers ordinarily try to bring over to their side. It refers instead to a process of discussion that reassures us of the rationality of whatever decisions we may come to in the end. The democratic standards we invoke in order to make such decisions are legitimate, from this point of view, only to the extent to which they promote and protect this process of discussion.
Now, if I am right about the way awareness of the need to appeal to majorities ensures the prominence of rhetoric in democratic deliberation, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that democratic institutions as we know them fail this particular test of legitimacy. But let us put aside that concern for the moment and ask a broader question: Does it make sense to treat the legitimacy of democratic decisions as something that flows from their contribution to the institutionalization of a process by which we justify moral claims? I think not. No doubt, we sometimes view the democratic process, like the adversarial system of justice, as a means of weeding out irrational, immoral, and self-serving claims. But as with the adversarial system of justice, we also rely on this process as a means of coordinating our actions and making authoritative judgments in conditions where we cannot identify or agree on what the most justifiable course of action would be.
That becomes clear when we look at the different ways we invoke standards of political legitimacy, on the one hand, and standards of moral justification, on the other. We ordinarily invoke political legitimacy as a threshold concept rather than as an ideal that we are trying to approximate. When invoking political legitimacy we are trying to determine whether we can all treat a particular decision as an authoritative expression of the community, not how authoritative or how acceptable that decision may be. When, in contrast, we invoke standards of moral justification, we are very interested in degrees of justification. For the issue there is how correct or morally acceptable our judgments can be, not how to identify a common standard of legitimacy that everyone can endorse. Talking about political legitimacy as something we approach “the more collective decision-making processes approximate [a deliberative] model” of moral justification thus defeats the purpose of invoking the legitimacy of political decisions in the first place,28 since it invites a debate about how much legitimacy is needed before we should accept democratic decisions as authoritative. Since even the most committed democrats are bound to differ on this question, these debates would probably be just as inconclusive as our public debates about the moral correctness of these decisions. Erase the distinction between political legitimacy and moral justification in this way and you might finally incite that “legitimation crisis” that Habermas has been warning us about for so many years.
As I have already noted, it is the popularity of Rawls’s and Habermas’s deliberative approaches to moral reasoning that has inspired this new understanding of democratic deliberation. It is relatively easy to write the practice of moral justification into one’s understanding of democratic deliberation when you begin with the belief that morally valid judgments are the product of an idealized process of deliberation among free and equal individuals. And it is relatively easy to reconcile democracy and the love of truth when you think that moral truth is the product of such a process.
But we need to ask the same question about this idealized process of democratic deliberation that we posed to the advocates of its institutionalization in democratic practice: How can such a process produce anything like determinate standards in the absence of some authoritative decision rule that brings deliberation to a close? This problem is much more acute for Habermas than for Rawls, since Habermas eschews the appeal to basic standards of reasonableness that Rawls still relies on to produce determinate results from his hypothetical vision of deliberation. For Habermas, unlike for Rawls, morally valid standards are produced by genuine deliberation among free and equal individuals rather than by the judgments that we hypothesize a reasonable individual would choose if compelled to enter into such a deliberation. But why should unconstrained conversation among free, equal, and rational individuals lead to determinate and generally accepted standards, let alone rational ones? Even if we grant Habermas the ideal conditions that eliminate time and other practical constraints on deliberation, why should we think that such an unconstrained discussion would avoid the dead ends, drift, and dispersal of focus with which we are all familiar from our own experiences with undirected discussion among large groups?29
The answer, I would suggest, is that Habermas and his followers are imagining moral justification to be a process undertaken, like real-world democratic deliberation, to inform authoritative decisions made by some understanding of the people. As the strong deliberative democrats treat democratic deliberation as the institutionalization of a process of discussion that justifies moral standards, so they treat that process of discussion as an idealization of the conditions of democratic deliberation. They remove the practical constraints and social inequalities that keep us from deliberating freely with each other in our actual institutions, but they retain from our real-world experience the expectation that the goal of the process is the production of shared standards that we can all recognize. They expect unconstrained discussion to produce determinate moral standards because they treat such discussion as if, like democratic deliberation, it is undertaken with the goal of making choices that we can all accept as legitimate expressions of the popular will. But there is no reason for our moral discussions to begin with such an expectation, unless we begin by writing the needs of political legitimacy into the practice of moral justification, which is precisely what I believe Habermas and his followers have done. Just as their discursive understanding of democratic deliberation is inspired by their conflation of political legitimacy with moral justification, so their deliberative understanding of moral justification is inspired by the conflation of moral justification with political legitimacy.
When we search for democratic standards of political legitimacy we are looking for interpretations of the principle of popular consent that allow us to act together without agreeing about the moral rightness of collective decisions. When we seek standards of moral justification we are looking for means of identifying what is right, not principles that allow us to act together. By imagining moral justification as an idealized process of democratic deliberation Habermas and his followers conflate these two distinct goals. The fact that I cannot gain assent from others for my moral claims tells me that my principles cannot ground the coordination of our actions by the political community, not that I am wrong. The deliberative democrats’ reconciliation of democracy and the love of truth thus succeeds only by blurring this distinction between the desire to get things right and the desire to establish social order and political coordination by an appeal to the principle of popular consent.
The “strong” version of deliberative democracy examined here is the most elaborate and influential attempt to harmonize democracy and the love of truth. But it will not be the last. For as long as we maintain our commitments to these two ideals we will be drawn to theories that promise to eliminate the tension between them. It is therefore important to emphasize that deliberative democracy’s failure to deliver on that promise is due to the character of democracy and the love of truth, rather than to any correctible mistakes in theory construction.
A commitment to democracy demands that we engage with, even defer to, the opinions of people who never have to acknowledge and account for their delusions and mistakes. It cannot tolerate the demand that everyone should be able to give an adequate account for their political judgments, a demand that searchers after truth, like Socrates examining the opinions of the Athenian citizens, are constantly making.30 The pursuit of truth, in contrast, demands that we discount or ignore the opinions of people whose delusions are manifest or easily demonstrated. It cannot tolerate any release from the demands of accountability. The tension between these two commitments is therefore unavoidable. You cannot eliminate that tension without seriously distorting one or both of these commitments.
Authority is the great enemy of the love of truth because it compels us to start from premises, modes of inquiry, and conclusions on the strength of their endorsement by particular individuals, rather than their ability to stand up to examination. Moreover authority compels us to persuade or find a way of replacing those individuals if we want to alter the judgments they make rather than simply expose their illusions and demonstrate their errors. If the emperor has the authority to set a community’s sartorial standards, then we may have to get used to going naked unless we can remove him from power or persuade him that his new clothes are no clothes at all.
A commitment to democracy inevitably creates tensions with the love of truth because it endorses, among other things, a particular distribution of authority. Compared to merely taking the trouble to be born the daughter of the king or the son of a duke, this democratic principle of distributive justice has the virtue of subjecting the granting of authority to rational examination and argument. But it still establishes a distribution of authority. It still points us toward the people whom we have to persuade if we want to establish or alter public standards, rather than to criteria for identifying error and dispelling illusion. Democratic principles give us a chance to argue about the leadership qualifications of anyone who wants to try on the emperor’s new clothes. But they measure the success of these arguments by their persuasiveness to large numbers of people, not by their ability to make manifest the nakedness of our leaders.
Pursuing the love of truth demands that we challenge democratic standards of authority no less than any other such standards. Indeed the deliberative democrats’ revised understanding of political legitimacy issues just such a challenge, even if few of its proponents are willing to acknowledge that it does so. For it derives the legitimacy of democratic decisions from the process of discussion and mutual accountability that precedes them rather than from their persuasiveness to authoritative decision makers. Taken seriously, this understanding of political legitimacy would require us to challenge the votes of people who cannot reasonably account for their political choices. None of the deliberative democrats has been willing to issue such a challenge, since it would immediately bring into question his or her own standing as a democrat. They never insist that we should discount the votes of people who, to use Tim Scanlon’s formulation, fail to endorse propositions that “they cannot reasonably reject.”31 But if we genuinely want to shift the focus of political legitimacy from voting to discussion and reason giving, then we have to be ready to do so. The unwillingness of deliberative democrats to issue such a challenge suggests that they are not fully committed to their proposed transformation of political legitimacy, that they continue to distinguish between the process of moral justification, where such challenges are appropriate, and the process of democratic deliberation, where they plainly are not.
The ideal of mutual accountability is a powerful tool in the pursuit of truth, since it insists that no degree of authority should free people from accounting for the claims they make about the world. And it challenges hierarchy in a way that certainly makes it seem democratic. No wonder, then, that even defenders of rhetoric against the deliberative democrats have begun to write mutual accountability into their understanding of democracy.32 Nevertheless, as a political ideal mutual accountability has profoundly antidemocratic implications. For it demands that we ignore or discount the judgments of people who cannot adequately account for the choices they have made. It thus cannot bridge this gap between democracy and the love of truth, even if it can, quite contrary to the intentions of its advocates, raise doubts about democratic standards of political legitimacy.
Attempts to eliminate the tensions between democracy and the love of truth tend to undermine our commitment to the latter as well. For they discourage us from discounting or ignoring opinions that cannot stand up to critical examination.
We certainly need to listen to others, especially when they disagree with us, if we are interested in pursuing the truth. But if that is our goal, then we also need to stop listening to them when they show themselves unwilling or unable to correct manifest errors and delusions in their judgments. Democrats cannot and should not stop listening to such people, since their success is measured by their ability to bring the greater number of people over to their side. Lovers of truth, in contrast, have to learn how to identify and ignore mistaken and irrelevant opinion.
Democratic commitments would not pose much of a problem for the lovers of truth if, like Rorty, we were willing to treat the love of truth as nothing more than a combination of curiosity and openness.33 For then the love of truth would draw us toward the opinions of paranoids and frauds no less, perhaps even more than the opinions of people who help us see the world more clearly. But the love of truth is inspired by dissatisfaction with inaccuracy and self-delusion, not just by curiosity and openness. It pushes us “to correct error, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to get beyond comfortable falsehood” rather than merely take pleasure in all of the curious sights and sounds the world has to offer.34 Even if we know that we cannot fully succeed in this quest, the love of truth inspires us to unmask and leave behind opinions that misrepresent the way things are, just as Rorty seeks to unmask and leave behind what he judges to be our delusions about truth.35
Attempts to harmonize democracy and the love of truth, like the deliberative approach to moral justification discussed in the preceding section, make it harder for us to do this. As we have seen, this understanding of moral justification rests on a process of unconstrained discussion in which we exchange and examine each other’s opinions. But no matter how much another’s opinion suffers when subjected to this process of examination, we can never simply leave it behind as long as it continues to be maintained by its advocate. For the justification of moral claims in this process of discussion rests on the ultimate agreement of the participants rather than the intrinsic qualities of their opinions. This leads, in general, to the overvaluing of the whole sphere of public opinion by Habermas and his followers. But it strikes particularly hard at the refinement and correction of opinion that the love of truth requires us to pursue.
Of course, the introduction of something like the Habermasian ideal of deliberative democracy would considerably increase the respect paid to the love of truth in democratic politics. In particular, it would increase the value that democrats place on sincerity, which, as Bernard Williams suggests, is a major component of the virtue of truthfulness.36 Indeed it is precisely rhetoric’s encouragement of deceptive, manipulative, and flattering speech that leads deliberative democrats to try to remove it from democratic public speech. Freed from the competition to persuade large numbers to come over to our side, we will be much less tolerant of insincere and deceitful political speech.
But even in democratic politics, efforts to reconcile democracy and the love of truth could at times undermine the latter. For there is a trade-off between sincerity and accuracy, the passion for getting things right that represents the other major component of the virtue of truthfulness.37 Make a cult of sincerity, as Elizabeth Markovits suggests most deliberative democrats tend to do,38 and you will shrink from the use of rhetorical appeals to character and emotion as means of breaking through the falsehoods that surround us. Chasing the orators from the marketplace might diminish the problem of misrepresentation and self-delusion in public life, but it would also strip us of one of our most effective means of addressing that problem.
There is nothing to prevent us from pursuing commitments to both democracy and the love of truth. The endorsement of democratic forms of political authority entails no particular understanding of truth. And, pace Plato, the love of truth entails no particular understanding of political authority. But if we want to continue to pursue both of these commitments, we need to get used to the discomfort that doing so is bound to create for us.
“Democracy,” as Michael Walzer elegantly puts it, “has no claims in the philosophical realm, and philosophers have no special rights in the political community.” In the democratic world, “truth is indeed another opinion, and the philosopher is only another opinion-maker.”39 And in the world of truth-seekers, popular opinion is just another claim to be examined and, if necessary, discarded, by the lover of truth. Trying to live in both of these worlds is bound to make us uncomfortable at times. But it is far better to learn how to live with this discomfort than to devalue both worlds by vain attempts to bring them into harmony with each other.