Instrumental Reasons to Reason Non-Instrumentally: Complexity, Rational Choice, and Habermas's Two-Track Model of Democracy
Date
2024-08-22
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Abstract
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most cited defenders of deliberative democracy in the modern era, but even he sharply limits the power of democratic deliberation to create and enforce political rules. Instead, that role is given to an administrative political system that operates autonomously from the lifeworld and its main site of deliberative democracy, the public sphere. In this thesis, I argue that this limitation on the power of deliberative democracy is unfounded. The strongest case Habermas can make about the necessity of a separate administrative system turns on his argument that communicative rationality is fundamentally distinct from instrumental rationality. From there, he must argue that the political system is the only track that can use instrumental rationality to cut through the complexity of the lifeworld and create efficacious political rules. However, a game theoretic model where agents attempt to solve a collective action problem in a complex, uncertain environment (a “Common Pool Resource Constituency Game”) shows us that an instrumentally rational utility-maximizer will behave largely the same as if they were exercising communicative rationality. The mechanism underlying this shift is that the only means by which actors can learn enough about other players and their environment is by orienting themselves towards communicative rationality, even if they enter a game with only strategic motivations. Thus, because the supposedly different forms of rationality blur into one another in complex environments, Habermasian liberals do not have a fundamental reason for arguing that the public sphere is powerless to create and enforce its own rules. Analytically, we should then expect public spheres to be generating their rules more frequently as complexity increases. Normatively, it means that we should refrain from using the complexity of modern society to impose political institutions on individuals from above, as this is likely to crowd-out the problem-solving capacity of deliberative democracy. The work of sociologist Fuyuki Kurasawa provides us with a theoretical and empirical framework of how social movements can generate their own rules, and exercise political power, without the use of formal political institutions. The thesis concludes with additional practical and theoretical considerations.
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Deliberative Democracy, Rational Choice Theory, Game Theory, Complexity, Habermas
Citation
Kemle, A. J. (2024). Instrumental reasons to reason non-instrumentally: complexity, rational choice, and Habermas’s two-track model of democracy (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.