Word: cottoning
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...there are some problems with Cotton's formulation. For one, nowhere does Habermas say that we should abandon elected government. As he writes in "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," "Discourses do not govern. They generate a communicative power that cannot take the place of administration, but can only influence it. This influence is limited to procurement and withdrawal of legitimation. Communicative power cannot supply a substitute for the systematic inner logic of public bureaucracies" (in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun...
Interestingly enough, the election of politicians is a good example of a public activity to which Habermas's criteria may be applied. Ironically, Cotton himself seems to support the idea that politicians should gain their authority via the deliberation of a rationally engaged electorate. He writes, "They [most Americans] may lack the talent needed to persuade others or the sophistication to avoid demagogues, but they surely possess the ability needed to hear politicians, ingest their arguments and vote according to their opinions." Habermas would likely agree with much of this statement...
...sound bites and empty catch phrases, and where an increasing number of individuals have become so cynical about the political process that they don't even bother to vote. That space where politicians communicate arguments to citizens and citizens develop their own opinions is in serious jeopardy. If Cotton is genuinely committed to his "true model of deliberative democracy," then it seems that he has much to learn from Habermas after all. --Jared H. Beck...
Thomas B. Cotton '98 makes the mistake of identifying a certain type of dialogue as uniquely legitimate in the framework of deliberate democracy ("Habermas Has Descended," Column, Dec. 5). According to Cotton, only those individuals who are capable of excluding their own passions and interests from their expressed opinions and who are able to achieve some kind of objective conception of the common good should be allowed to participate in that dialogue. For the rest of us, we are left to decide who the participants in that dialogue should be based on our assessments of the quality and the content...
...degrades the content of what those outside the "chosen" circle have to say. It is even untenable as an elitist model: since no person's arguments can be free of personal interest, and no one is capable of fully conceiving some objectively defined version of the common good, Cotton is effectively calling for the establishment of an elite whose membership would consist of the empty set. Moreover, the very idea that there exists some singular and objective idea of the common good is contradictory to the idea of democratic government--if any one person or group of people is capable...