Deliberative Democracy for a Great Society

According to Albert Weale, as long as the parties to a social contract have equal bargaining power, the agreement they make will incorporate principles of democratic justice. However, as argued in this article, deciding what counts as equal bargaining power requires the parties to display, in the first instance, a prior commitment to deliberation. In other words, it requires them to see things as others see them and to weigh their reasons equally in the balance with their own. Weale is sceptical about the prospects for deliberation in great modern societies; there are simply far too many of us to deliberate together. Hence, he thinks that fairness and equality are better understood as matters of convention. However, this not only overlooks the possibilities for thinking about deliberation in more systemic terms, but also overlooks the fact that sometimes a society can only be truly great by breaking with convention.