Book Launch of Bernard Reber's Responsible Deliberation Between Conversation and Consideration

There is no democracy without responsible deliberation. Deliberation is not just a respectful discussion without mutual recognition of individual and institutional responsibilities. The book Responsible Deliberation Between Conversation and Consideration discusses the theory of deliberative democracy including its philosophical foundations and their often faulty translations for empirical work. It analyses large-scale experiments involving citizens, elected representatives, civil society and experts in great new debates, participating in democratic innovation to face challenges such as the just ecological transition, the Green Deal or the future of Europe.

The book Responsible Deliberation Between Conversation and Consideration responds to the forgotten problems of how we talk to and criticize each other. Deliberation and accountability call for different communicative capacities, not only narration, but also interpretation and argumentation, as well as all the resources of rhetoric, invented to respond to democratic complexity. It also explores two other paths: political conversation and consideration, and allows us to move from defiant criticism to an 'all things considered' judgment.

These communicative resources are deployed in "conversation", which is conducive to risk-taking, orality and improvisation; in "deliberation", which deals with disagreements and uncertainties through argumentative enquiry; and in "consideration", which is attentive to the partners in the discussion and to those who are absent.

Publisher's homepage: https://www.iste.co.uk/book.php?id=2058

Bernard Reber is CNRS-affiliated Senior Researcher, member of the Political Research Center of Sciences Po, Paris. He is a political and moral philosopher. He is an expert (in the theory and practice) of deliberative democracy. Recently, he was an observer for the French Great national Debate, the Citizen Convention for the Climate, the Conference on the Future of Europe, and Guarantor of the last Citizen Convention on the End of Life.