ISSN 1027-0353
African Journal of Political Science ISSN 3461-2165 Vol. 9 (2), pp. 001-008, February, 2015. © International Scholars Journals
Full Length Research Paper
Explanation of deliberative democracy in philosophical thoughts of Jurgen Habermas
A. M. Shahramnia
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Accepted 21 October, 2014
Abstract
As democracy has a generative nature, there is a continuous discussion and study about its principles, teachings, objectives and conceptual development. The current article follows theory research and scientific explanation of effect and reflections of theoretical – philosophical foundation of Jurgen Habermas (born in June, 18, 1929) for making his consultant democracy discourse. In other words, research on discourse democracy theory of this political scientist and studying and evaluating reflection and generalization of his philosophical and epistemological principles are objectives which the researcher follows in this work. According to Habermas’ conceptual reading, democracy of welfare liberal states in modern capitalist societies has similar dimension and it s essentially based on unidirectional and inappropriate teachings of instrumental rationality. Therefore, Habermas has established his democracy theory based on his thoughts and principles in theoretical and philosophical field. Recovery of epistemology principles and a method resulting from his thoughts are very important. From this view, there is representation of concepts and categories such as epistemology interests, communication action, discoursing ethics, ideal situation of speech, and general field as the most prominent components and principles of his democracy. These concepts were chosen and studied, because of their importance to and situation of this topic; they represent logical relation between epistemology principles of Habermas and its resulted criteria and teaching with his democracy model. For this reason, by searching the thoughts and representing Habermas’ theoretical collection, there are clarified and identified democracy principles and criteria and their distinctive and theoretical components. The analyzed discoursive democracy pattern of Habermas and its capabilities in analytical– descriptive perspective and library studying is also added. Researchers believe that the considered discourse democracy of Habermas has a deep philosophical root and it is considered as a part of knowledge foundation and a methodology that is focused on freedom. He processes discoursive democracy in a wide public sphere, by relying on discourse ethic. This he did by considering higher reasoning and critical reading from modern rationality in form of communication rationality concept, in which its objective and nature is a freedom idea. The true matter is identified by considering the obtained results. That is, by searching Habermas’ thought scope and horizon in all of his works and resources on idea of necessity relation between thinking and providing ideal situation that focuses on freedom teaching in his democracy theory. Therefore, findings of this research show that political opinions and thoughts of Habermas have emerged and are affected from principles of his philosophical frame. For this reason, epistemological strong tracks of Habermas have been reflective in his appropriate democracy.
Key words: Discoursive democracy, public sphere, communicative action, ideal speech situation.