Political Economy and Deliberative Democracy.

This essay is meant as an attempt to sway deliberative democrats and political economists that they need each other. Deliberative democracy, as a practical public philosophy, has many unresolved tensions and hard choices between competing values it wishes to promote. While critics are quick to point out that deliberative democracy must economize on its values as a governing philosophy, it remains as yet unclear whether or not such economizing can or cannot be done without doing excessive violence to the deliberative ideal. For my own part, I suspect that deliberative democracy is a generally beneficial understanding of the public good for political regimes in our time. However, I do not try to make that argument here, but I assume that it would be an improvement for democratic theory to successfully economize on the deliberative ideal. Instead, I focus on what I hope are some helpful prefatory comments about many of the important questions on the relationship between deliberative democracy and political economy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]