Democracy is characterised by both deliberation and agonism: by convergence as well as contestation. On the one hand, democratic institutions such as parliament, the academy, and the media facilitate the popular discussions that help legitimise our shared social order; on the other, democracy involves the contestation of unjust or illegitimate social arrangements through protests, direct action and, at times, violence. In their book, Mary Scudder and Stephen White give substance to the commonplace intuition that both deliberation and conflict play crucial roles in building and maintaining a legitimate democratic order, and argue that the central value of ‘moral equality of voice’ should guide us in determining the most appropriate democratic expression at a given juncture.

Scudder and White position their contribution against the backdrop of an ongoing debate between proponents of deliberative and agonist models of democracy. Advocates of the former, who argue that legitimacy arises through reasoned discussion, are often blind to the corrupting effects of structural injustices and power relations on deliberative processes. Conversely, advocates of the latter, who emphasise that the essence of politics is the struggle against political adversaries, often underplay the importance of shared, democratically legitimised restraints on that conflict. Scudder and White seek to preserve the strengths of both models, while compensating for their respective weaknesses, by integrating them into what they refer to as a ‘communicative model of democracy’. While this exercise produces a number of useful and critical insights, Scudder and White, in my opinion, are unsuccessful in their aim of bringing the two models together.

Bridging the gap between deliberative and agonist models of democracy first requires a broad reappraisal of both, to pull them away from the clutches of their most puritan proponents and to identify the grounds on which the two models may interrelate. Scudder and White take up this task in the first three substantive chapters of their book (chs 2, 3, and 4). In chapter 2, they critically reconstruct the deliberative turn in democratic theory, drawing on the works of Jürgen Habermas, Joshua Cohen, Simone Chambers, and Iris Marion Young. They demonstrate that since its inception, deliberative democratic theory has been trying to identify the type of communication that can generate legitimate political decisions in the face of difference and disagreement.

Scudder and White emphasise that, over the years, deliberative democratic theory has abandoned its narrow, overly rationalistic understanding of ‘appropriate’ communication—its ‘straitjacket of rational discourse’ (p. 37)—and embraced a much more ecumenical understanding of deliberation. This expanded conception includes greeting, rhetoric, storytelling, as well as the communicative interactions of everyday life, and has culminated in the emergent ‘systemic approach to deliberative democracy’, which sees deliberation as ‘a communicative activity that occurs across multiple, interlinked, but functionally differentiated sites’ (p. 40). While this narrative, tracing the development of deliberative theory from Habermas to the deliberative system, will offer little new to those working within the field, Scudder and White present their reconstruction with great lucidity, and offer a valuable introduction for those unfamiliar with the deliberative democratic canon.

Chapter 3 is more directly relevant to specialists. It addresses the charges of ‘normative unmooring’ and ‘concept stretching’ that have been levied against the more expansive understandings of deliberative democracy in general, and the systemic turn in particular. Some misguided puritans (most notably David Owen and Graham Smith), whose conceptual gerrymandering ultimately limits deliberative democracy’s transformative potential, cling to the reductive understanding of deliberation associated with ‘deliberative forums’: those ‘discrete practices of deliberation’ (p. 46) in which all deliberative desiderata need to be met at the same time. Scudder and White convincingly show why it is neither feasible nor desirable to prioritise the practice of deliberation over the property of deliberativeness in complex political systems (pp. 62–68), as the practice of deliberation by itself cannot guarantee that ‘decisions are arrived at through inclusive communication among those who will be affected by them’ (p. 65). Scudder and White therefore propose to ‘decentre the practice of deliberation’, and instead encourage deliberative democrats to critically interrogate all the complex, informal, and diffuse ways in which opinion and will formation occurs.

With this more broadly conceived ‘communicative model of democracy’ in mind, Scudder and White turn to democracy’s ‘agonist face’ in chapter 4 to explore how certain conflictual expressions of democracy might contribute to a ‘moral equality of voice’ and, by extension, the normative core of deliberative democracy. To this end, they reconstruct the agonist model of democracy, drawing on the works of Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, and Bonnie Honig. They highlight that Mouffe’s earlier, more ‘imperialising’ formulation of agonism is grounded in a Schmittian political ontology that defines politics as an essential struggle between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. Scudder and White argue that this ontological stance is incompatible with Mouffe’s concurrent commitment to the ‘ethico-political principles of liberal democracy’. As they rhetorically ask: ‘Why would someone whose basic existential-ontological understanding of the world is framed in terms of friends and enemies not violate norms of liberty and equality whenever protecting one’s “friends” seems necessary?’ (p. 81). Connolly and Honig, by contrast, are seen as adopting a ‘weak’ political ontology, which similarly acknowledges the impulse to differentiate but also makes (some) room for a justice orientation rooted in equality and autonomy that to some extent constrains political conflict. Scudder and White ultimately contend that this ‘tempered agonism’ aligns more consistently with the normative core of deliberative democracy.

While the fourth chapter offers a cogent reconstruction of the agonist model of democracy, it also raises concerns about the book’s framing. Scudder and White present their work as bridging the gap between agonist and deliberative models, suggesting that both contribute somewhat equally to the ‘communicative model of democracy’ that they construct. However, chapter 4 reveals that while they affirm the commonplace intuition that disagreement, conflict, and contestation are essential to a healthy democracy, Scudder and White also believe that agonism’s broader ontological and normative commitments sit uncomfortably with the deliberative democratic architectonic and, crucially, with the communicative model they themselves propose. For Scudder and White, conflict is valuable, not for agonist reasons, but only insofar it serves the normative core of deliberative democracy. In that sense, they do not successfully integrate agonism and deliberation on equal terms. Rather, they subordinate the former to the latter.

What is more, it seems to me that, in chapter 4, Scudder and White conflate the agonist model of democracy (which they broadly reject) with discrete practices of contestation (which they rightly value)—or at least assume that the former is required to justify the latter. It is, however, unnecessary to invoke agonism to demonstrate that disagreement, protests, strikes, and direct action have democratic and deliberative value. In fact, as Scudder and White themselves argue in chapters 2 and 3, deliberative democracy is a complex, informal, and diffuse communicative process grounded in the moral significance of difference and disagreement, with conflict playing a critical role in both actual and ideal processes of opinion and will formation, carving out plenty of space to validate practices of contestation without having to rely on a (weak) agonist political ontology. Scudder and White’s reliance on the agonist model, in my opinion, distracts from the purpose of their argument: to reclaim conflict and contestation for the broader deliberative agenda.

These issues are further underscored in the last two chapters of the book, in which Scudder and White formulate an ‘originary exemplary scene’ that elucidates the ‘normative core of communicative democracy’, namely ‘moral equality of voice’, by drawing on and departing from the works of Habermas. Scudder and White themselves admit that this ‘hardly seems like a promising avenue for imagining an exemplary scene that can vivify agonism as emphatically as it would deliberation’ (p. 146) and in that, they are right—but this issue arises only because they themselves impose that expectation on their work. If the book had expressed the more modest aim of showing how and when contestatory practices hold normative value in a deliberative system, it would have easily met its own standards. Scudder and White convincingly show that the ability to contest symbolic reproduction in a way that is animated by an aspirational ethical core of convergence and reparation lies at the heart of a more ‘radicalised communicative model of democracy’ (p. 150)—and that is an important insight in its own right.

While the book’s ambition to enable convergence between agonists and deliberative democrats is admirable, I am doubtful that it will speak to agonists in the way it aspires to. But this is still an insightful piece of work which makes a very important contribution to deliberative democratic theory in general, and the systemic approach to deliberative democracy in particular, by drawing deliberative democracy’s normative core away from deliberative practices and recentring its attention on its Habermasian roots, showing how conflict and contestation play a crucial role in achieving communicative legitimacy and, ultimately, a just society.