| A number of recent contributions to liberal theory present normative accounts of legitimate political authority in which the concept of rational public dialogue is assigned a major role. These doctrines agree that principles governing relations between members of a liberal society, and the policies enforced by liberal governments, should be ones that could pass the test of a properly structured dialogue among citizens. I engage seven such doctrines in this dissertation, treating them as versions of an approach to liberal theory I call dialogic liberalism. My goal is to judge how well dialogic liberalism might support social conditions favorable to securing the values of individuality and the widest possible freedom of action and belief. I approach this question primarily via an examination of a set of attitudes that I contend subscription to any of the dialogic accounts of legitimacy might engender in the citizenry of a dialogic regime. I find that these accounts make use of a misleadingly benign picture of authority that could induce citizens to approach the practice of democratic rule with unwarranted insouciance, that they rely upon norms of civic conduct that could sanction a regrettable impulse to stigmatize conceptions of the good in tension with the aim of producing a dialogic public culture, and that they employ an ideal of transparency in public discourse that creates unacknowledged blind spots. I conclude that the political milieu of dialogic consensuality that this approach seeks to foster would provide a less hospitable a climate for diversity than its advocates present it as doing and, more importantly, than what liberals should aspire to achieve. |
