I'm loving our conversation here. It's challenging me to think more deeply about my own position (and I hope the same is true for you too!)
So, you've engaged seriously with the ideas of the deliberative wave, but your argument rests on a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between the aesthetics of procedure and the struggle for structural power. From the perspective of a transformative socialist politics, these are not rivals but the same project.
You're so right to point out that Macron diluted the French Climate Convention results! However, rather than proving the failure of deliberation, that moment actually exposed the steering crisis Habermas diagnosed decades ago. It created a visible, public friction between the collective intelligence of 150 ordinary people and the rigid imperatives of capital. That friction is a massive gift to organizers because it strips away the illusion that the state is a neutral arbiter and shows exactly where the blockage lies.
If we want to expropriate the landlords or socialize the banks, we need more than just a vanguard or a protest. We need a massive popular mandate that the current captured parliamentary system will never provide. This is where the Habermas legacy becomes a radical tool. Citizens' Assemblies are not just for social issues like marriage equality. They are the training grounds for the very workers' councils and popular assemblies the revolutionary tradition calls for. They prove that the ordinary person is capable of complex economic reasoning, which is the first step toward demanding workers' control over investment decisions.
The OECD may embrace these tools to stabilize the system, but history is full of ruling class innovations being turned into weapons for liberation. We shouldn't cede the ground of reason and deliberation to the liberals! If the ideal speech situation currently produces catastrophic statements on Gaza or diluted climate policy, it's not because the tool is broken. It's because the horizon of the possible is still being policed by those in power.
The task for the modern Left is to expand these boundaries until they collide with the structures of capital. We should be demanding that the deliberative model be applied to the structural pillars missing from the current debate. Imagine a UK Citizens' Assembly tasked with the socialization of the banks to move from a debt-driven private system to a network of regional, democratically controlled investment banks. Imagine an assembly on Universal Basic Services to ensure that essentials like transport and energy are removed from the market entirely, or one on Land Value Tax to end the exploitation of our cities by landlords.
Your perspective suggests that better communication cannot bridge the gap to structural transformation, but I disagree. Collective intelligence is a dangerous weapon. If 150 randomly selected people were to conclude that the current land system is a scam, it carries a moral authority that no vanguard can replicate. The French Climate Convention didn't fail because the citizens were deliberative. It failed because the power was not binding. The next step is the demand for Legislative Assemblies with the power to bypass captured parliaments and trigger binding referendums.
You're making a very useful provocation. A publicly visible collision between the collective intelligence of 150 ordinary citizens and the rigid imperatives of capital does something real: it names the blockage, strips away the neutrality-of-the-state illusion, hands organisers a concrete and legible target. The French climate convention didn’t just fail. It demonstrated, in public, exactly where the power lies and who exercises it. That’s a political resource, not a consolation prize.
And yes: history is full of ruling-class innovations turned into weapons for liberation. Trade unions were a ruling-class attempt to manage labour conflict. The institutional form doesn’t determine its use forever. That’s a serious point and I won’t wave it away.
But here is where I want to press, because I think the argument contains its own answer.
You want Legislative Assemblies with binding power that can bypass captured parliaments. Good. So do I. But who enforces binding? If a captured parliament won’t implement the French climate recommendations, what makes it legislate away its own supremacy in favour of a new assembly with binding power over the socialisation of the banks? The answer can only be: because there is a movement outside the assembly that has made the political cost of refusal higher than the cost of compliance. Not a vanguard in the caricatured sense. Not a single protest. An organised political force, rooted in workplaces and communities, that has made the threat of non-compliance credible.
That outside force is not itself deliberative. It’s what Bensaïd meant by strategic reason: the accumulation of organised power that changes what the system is willing to accept. The assembly produces the legitimacy. The organised movement produces the leverage. Without the second, the first gets Macron’d. Every time.
So I don’t think we disagree about the destination. We disagree about the sequence and the motor. The argument seems to be: better deliberative institutions will train and radicalise enough citizens that the demand for binding power eventually becomes irresistible. My argument is that the demand becomes credible only when the organised working class is strong enough to make refusal costly, and that deliberative institutions, whatever their genuine value, don’t themselves generate that strength.
The “training grounds” claim is where I’d push hardest, because it’s asserted rather than demonstrated. What does the evidence actually show about the political trajectories of citizens’ assembly participants after the process ends? The Irish experience is instructive here. The abortion referendum was a real transformation, won through a real deliberative process. And then? The participants went home feeling, rightly, that they had been heard. Feeling heard and becoming a political force are different things. The assembly didn’t produce a cohort of organisers demanding workers’ control over investment decisions. It produced a successful reform and a return to normal politics.
The moral authority point is real but needs examining carefully. If 150 randomly selected citizens conclude that the land system is a scam, that carries authority before whom? Not before the landlords, who respond to organised power, not legitimacy. Before the unorganised majority who might be moveable: yes, genuinely. That’s a real function. But it’s a function in service of an organising strategy that has to exist independently of the assembly, driven by forces the assembly doesn’t itself generate.
None of this is an argument for abandoning the terrain of deliberation to the liberals. It’s an argument about what deliberative forms can and cannot do on their own. The assembly produces moral authority. The organised movement produces leverage. Neither is sufficient without the other. Habermas’s error wasn’t theorising deliberation. It was theorising it as sufficient, and his political trajectory, from Kosovo to Gaza, is what that error looks like when it reaches its conclusion.
Do you know what? I think we finally reached a place of agreement here! ☺️
“The assembly produces the legitimacy. The organised movement produces the leverage. Without the second, the first gets Macron’ed. Every time.”
But I would also add that the dynamic works the other way round too. What I see of people who take part in citizens’ assemblies is that they feel empowered and inspired. Sometimes for the very first time in their lives. It engenders solidarity, and It can lead to them entering the movement and working to produce that leverage.
Great, insightful work, as ever - thank you! I agree with you on most of the salient points. However, if I may, I would suggest that your theoretical framework is too narrow.
While yours is a sharp and mostly valid critique of Habermas’s personal political trajectory, I think you're missing his most significant practical legacy: the birth of deliberative democracy. You frame his shift toward communicative reason as a retreat into the seminar room, but the global Deliberative Wave identified by the OECD suggests the exact opposite.
Habermas’s core contribution was the shift from seeing humanity through the lens of labour to the lens of communication.He argued that if we fix how we talk, we fix how we govern. By defining the ideal speech situation (a space where the only force is the unforced force of the better argument) he provided the philosophical DNA for the citizens' assemblies and other deliberative instruments like participatory budgeting that we see today.
These are not social illusions but instruments of collective intelligence that have broken deadlocks that traditional politics were frightened to touch. In the Republic of Ireland, for example, their institutionalised citizens' assemblies took on the most polarized issues in the country, leading directly to referendums that legalized marriage equality and repealed the Eighth Amendment. It proved that ordinary citizens, when given the time and information to deliberate, are often more courageous and collectively intelligent than the politicians who represent them.
(I recommend also watching the videos of the expert contributions and the plenary sessions of the one on biodiversity, which I found truly inspiring.)
Similarly, France’s Citizens’ Convention for Climate and the recent Assembly on the End of Life have demonstrated that Habermasian principles can guide a nation through complex existential crises.
The OECD’s Deliberative Wave now counts over 300 examples worldwide, from permanent citizen bodies in East Belgium to climate assemblies in Scotland. Some are even calling for the House of Lords in the UK to be replaced by a People's Chamber of randomly selected citizens. So we're seeing a profound shift toward institutionalized deliberation. Scholars like John Dryzek have taken this theory and turned it into a practical mechanism for reclaiming the public sphere from what Habermas called refeudalization, or the takeover of public life by corporate and state interests. To mourn the death of his promise is to ignore that his theories are currently being built into the very foundations of 21st century democracy. He may have faltered as a political commentator, but as an architect of a more collectively intelligent, deliberative humanity, his work is only just beginning to bear fruit.
https://iai.tv/articles/jurgen-habermas-influential-champion-of-modern-democracy-auid-3526
I'm loving our conversation here. It's challenging me to think more deeply about my own position (and I hope the same is true for you too!)
So, you've engaged seriously with the ideas of the deliberative wave, but your argument rests on a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between the aesthetics of procedure and the struggle for structural power. From the perspective of a transformative socialist politics, these are not rivals but the same project.
You're so right to point out that Macron diluted the French Climate Convention results! However, rather than proving the failure of deliberation, that moment actually exposed the steering crisis Habermas diagnosed decades ago. It created a visible, public friction between the collective intelligence of 150 ordinary people and the rigid imperatives of capital. That friction is a massive gift to organizers because it strips away the illusion that the state is a neutral arbiter and shows exactly where the blockage lies.
If we want to expropriate the landlords or socialize the banks, we need more than just a vanguard or a protest. We need a massive popular mandate that the current captured parliamentary system will never provide. This is where the Habermas legacy becomes a radical tool. Citizens' Assemblies are not just for social issues like marriage equality. They are the training grounds for the very workers' councils and popular assemblies the revolutionary tradition calls for. They prove that the ordinary person is capable of complex economic reasoning, which is the first step toward demanding workers' control over investment decisions.
The OECD may embrace these tools to stabilize the system, but history is full of ruling class innovations being turned into weapons for liberation. We shouldn't cede the ground of reason and deliberation to the liberals! If the ideal speech situation currently produces catastrophic statements on Gaza or diluted climate policy, it's not because the tool is broken. It's because the horizon of the possible is still being policed by those in power.
The task for the modern Left is to expand these boundaries until they collide with the structures of capital. We should be demanding that the deliberative model be applied to the structural pillars missing from the current debate. Imagine a UK Citizens' Assembly tasked with the socialization of the banks to move from a debt-driven private system to a network of regional, democratically controlled investment banks. Imagine an assembly on Universal Basic Services to ensure that essentials like transport and energy are removed from the market entirely, or one on Land Value Tax to end the exploitation of our cities by landlords.
Your perspective suggests that better communication cannot bridge the gap to structural transformation, but I disagree. Collective intelligence is a dangerous weapon. If 150 randomly selected people were to conclude that the current land system is a scam, it carries a moral authority that no vanguard can replicate. The French Climate Convention didn't fail because the citizens were deliberative. It failed because the power was not binding. The next step is the demand for Legislative Assemblies with the power to bypass captured parliaments and trigger binding referendums.
You're making a very useful provocation. A publicly visible collision between the collective intelligence of 150 ordinary citizens and the rigid imperatives of capital does something real: it names the blockage, strips away the neutrality-of-the-state illusion, hands organisers a concrete and legible target. The French climate convention didn’t just fail. It demonstrated, in public, exactly where the power lies and who exercises it. That’s a political resource, not a consolation prize.
And yes: history is full of ruling-class innovations turned into weapons for liberation. Trade unions were a ruling-class attempt to manage labour conflict. The institutional form doesn’t determine its use forever. That’s a serious point and I won’t wave it away.
But here is where I want to press, because I think the argument contains its own answer.
You want Legislative Assemblies with binding power that can bypass captured parliaments. Good. So do I. But who enforces binding? If a captured parliament won’t implement the French climate recommendations, what makes it legislate away its own supremacy in favour of a new assembly with binding power over the socialisation of the banks? The answer can only be: because there is a movement outside the assembly that has made the political cost of refusal higher than the cost of compliance. Not a vanguard in the caricatured sense. Not a single protest. An organised political force, rooted in workplaces and communities, that has made the threat of non-compliance credible.
That outside force is not itself deliberative. It’s what Bensaïd meant by strategic reason: the accumulation of organised power that changes what the system is willing to accept. The assembly produces the legitimacy. The organised movement produces the leverage. Without the second, the first gets Macron’d. Every time.
So I don’t think we disagree about the destination. We disagree about the sequence and the motor. The argument seems to be: better deliberative institutions will train and radicalise enough citizens that the demand for binding power eventually becomes irresistible. My argument is that the demand becomes credible only when the organised working class is strong enough to make refusal costly, and that deliberative institutions, whatever their genuine value, don’t themselves generate that strength.
The “training grounds” claim is where I’d push hardest, because it’s asserted rather than demonstrated. What does the evidence actually show about the political trajectories of citizens’ assembly participants after the process ends? The Irish experience is instructive here. The abortion referendum was a real transformation, won through a real deliberative process. And then? The participants went home feeling, rightly, that they had been heard. Feeling heard and becoming a political force are different things. The assembly didn’t produce a cohort of organisers demanding workers’ control over investment decisions. It produced a successful reform and a return to normal politics.
The moral authority point is real but needs examining carefully. If 150 randomly selected citizens conclude that the land system is a scam, that carries authority before whom? Not before the landlords, who respond to organised power, not legitimacy. Before the unorganised majority who might be moveable: yes, genuinely. That’s a real function. But it’s a function in service of an organising strategy that has to exist independently of the assembly, driven by forces the assembly doesn’t itself generate.
None of this is an argument for abandoning the terrain of deliberation to the liberals. It’s an argument about what deliberative forms can and cannot do on their own. The assembly produces moral authority. The organised movement produces leverage. Neither is sufficient without the other. Habermas’s error wasn’t theorising deliberation. It was theorising it as sufficient, and his political trajectory, from Kosovo to Gaza, is what that error looks like when it reaches its conclusion.
Do you know what? I think we finally reached a place of agreement here! ☺️
“The assembly produces the legitimacy. The organised movement produces the leverage. Without the second, the first gets Macron’ed. Every time.”
But I would also add that the dynamic works the other way round too. What I see of people who take part in citizens’ assemblies is that they feel empowered and inspired. Sometimes for the very first time in their lives. It engenders solidarity, and It can lead to them entering the movement and working to produce that leverage.
Great, insightful work, as ever - thank you! I agree with you on most of the salient points. However, if I may, I would suggest that your theoretical framework is too narrow.
While yours is a sharp and mostly valid critique of Habermas’s personal political trajectory, I think you're missing his most significant practical legacy: the birth of deliberative democracy. You frame his shift toward communicative reason as a retreat into the seminar room, but the global Deliberative Wave identified by the OECD suggests the exact opposite.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/innovative-citizen-participation-and-new-democratic-institutions_339306da-en.html
Habermas’s core contribution was the shift from seeing humanity through the lens of labour to the lens of communication.He argued that if we fix how we talk, we fix how we govern. By defining the ideal speech situation (a space where the only force is the unforced force of the better argument) he provided the philosophical DNA for the citizens' assemblies and other deliberative instruments like participatory budgeting that we see today.
These are not social illusions but instruments of collective intelligence that have broken deadlocks that traditional politics were frightened to touch. In the Republic of Ireland, for example, their institutionalised citizens' assemblies took on the most polarized issues in the country, leading directly to referendums that legalized marriage equality and repealed the Eighth Amendment. It proved that ordinary citizens, when given the time and information to deliberate, are often more courageous and collectively intelligent than the politicians who represent them.
https://citizensassembly.ie/
(I recommend also watching the videos of the expert contributions and the plenary sessions of the one on biodiversity, which I found truly inspiring.)
Similarly, France’s Citizens’ Convention for Climate and the recent Assembly on the End of Life have demonstrated that Habermasian principles can guide a nation through complex existential crises.
The OECD’s Deliberative Wave now counts over 300 examples worldwide, from permanent citizen bodies in East Belgium to climate assemblies in Scotland. Some are even calling for the House of Lords in the UK to be replaced by a People's Chamber of randomly selected citizens. So we're seeing a profound shift toward institutionalized deliberation. Scholars like John Dryzek have taken this theory and turned it into a practical mechanism for reclaiming the public sphere from what Habermas called refeudalization, or the takeover of public life by corporate and state interests. To mourn the death of his promise is to ignore that his theories are currently being built into the very foundations of 21st century democracy. He may have faltered as a political commentator, but as an architect of a more collectively intelligent, deliberative humanity, his work is only just beginning to bear fruit.
I have added a reply to Deborah at https://redmole.substack.com/i/191235774/postscript-on-deliberative-democracy