Abstrakt
It is no secret that deliberative democracy has been born and defended in opposition to interest group politics, has been rooted in political theories centred on a qualitative distinction of the public realm from the private one and has relied on the suppression of interest in the public exchange of reasons for the accomplishment of many of its fundamental goals. Such being more or less the deliberative ideal, how should we cope with the interestedness of citizens when they should focus on the common good and exercise their public reason? What I shall argue here is that the problems of interest politics that deliberative democracy opposes do not stem from interest as such, but rather from the circumstances in which interest is brought to be expressed in politics and the corresponding ways in which it is being expressed, that is, the practices of interest expression encouraged by the institutional structure (a passively inclusive one) and else.
This conflation, then, seems to be facilitated and sustained by a dichotomist conception of interests and reasons/reasoning.