Simone Chambers
At his most ambitious, Habermas claims that the ideal of a consensually steered society is inherent to discourse ethics.1 What would such a society look like? What would it require of citizens? What place does or should consensus have in our pluralistic world? Although not for the most part inspired by Habermas, many feminist activist groups have consciously adopted procedures of consensual will-formation. This paper investigates the dynamics of small-group consensual will-formation in the hope that such real-world undertakings can shed light on some of the above questions.
I begin by describing a discursive experiment undertaken by a group of feminist antinuclear activists. These activists worked out and implemented a set of concrete guidelines for consensual will-formation. One of the most interesting aspects of these guidelines is that, in drawing them up, participants realized that fulfilling the conditions of discourse meant more than simply adhering to certain procedural rules. Rules limit action. Successful discourse requires more than external limits on action; participants must adopt particular and concrete attitudes towards each other. In achieving attitudes productive for discourse, an ethic of care which accentuates responding to others (a reaching out to others) is more helpful than an ethic of justice which stresses not interfering with others (a limitation of the self). Thus, I argue that the feminist experiment in consensual will-formation points to the necessity of learning how to be discursive actors as opposed to strategic actors.
To what extent can the dynamics of a small-scale activist group be reproduced at the level of society at large? The most obvious objection to this type of move is that it is unrealistic given the diversity and plurality of modem liberal democracies. I argue that although the consensual “way of life” adopted by the activists is an unrealistic model on a larger scale, discourse and consensual will-formation are not incompatible with pluralism as such. However, a further problem arises: from a goal-oriented perspective of coming to a hard-and-fast collective decision, consensual will-formation is highly inefficient. As participation becomes wider and more diverse, discourse becomes less efficient. This leads to the conclusion that beyond small and relatively homogeneous groups, discourse cannot serve as an efficacious or even realistic method of decision-making. This does not mean, however, that discourse has no role to play in democratic politics. I argue that the proper domain of consensual will-formation is cultural reproduction. A consensually steered society is one in which public opinion, rather than public decisions, is reproduced and altered discursively.