Republican deliberation and symbolic violence in Rousseau and Bourdieu

Introduction

Republican theory has placed considerable emphasis on the role of deliberation in the politics of non-domination. However, it has paid insufficient heed to the possibility that political deliberation itself may harbour insidious forms of interpersonal domination. In Pettit’s neo-Roman account of republican politics, deliberation serves primarily to ensure that state power tracks commonly avowed interests, such that it can be subject to an equally shared popular control and, thus, represent a form of non-dominating self-rule. While most republican theorists value deliberation for its role in a politics aimed at stemming public and private domination across a range of interpersonal, communal and political relationships, they generally under-account for the forms of domination embedded in the deliberative practice itself. My aim is to juxtapose Pettit’s neo-republican account with an alternative view of deliberation which, I argue, is broadly speaking shared by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Pierre Bourdieu. Rousseau’s austere communitarianism is motivated in large part, I argue, by a concern that political deliberation will, in complex and differentiated societies, degenerate into a corrupting competition for symbolic capital. For Bourdieu similarly, political deliberation, like other social practices, confers distinction or social capital on the basis of differential competences. It is conducted using highly coded vocabularies, techniques and styles that are hierarchically distributed: our deliberative competence is evaluated based not on our rationality or cognitive abilities, but rather on our habitus and the various mundane factors that constitute an ‘articulatory style’. Therefore the highly insidious status hierarchies embedded in deliberative practice can render it an important site of symbolic violence. Accordingly, I argue first that from both the Bourdieusian and Rousseauan perspectives, the problem is not so much that the capabilities necessary for deliberative participation are unequally shared or distributed, but rather that these required competences have an essentially arbitrary value, being rooted in the apparently most mundane of stylistic and bodily techniques. For both, it is thus the (invisible) arbitrariness of these participative tools that renders political deliberation potentially dominating (and symbolically violent). This brings into question the very possibility of republican politics under contemporary conditions.

Second, I argue that unlike the neo-republicans, Bourdieu and Rousseau understand domination generally as ritually and symbolically encoded. Unlike most republicans, Rousseau realizes that domination cannot be understood simply as the subjection of individual choice to ‘alien will’. His sometimes bracing politics of austerity is the solution to – or perhaps, the cost of fostering – a non-dominating form of public deliberation.

I will begin by outlining the role of deliberation in republican theory, focusing on Pettit’s neo-Roman account. I will then compare the role of symbolic power in Rousseau’s and Bourdieu’s thought. Subsequently I will consider this understanding as it applies to the case of political deliberation specifically. Finally, I detail how this understanding may reveal certain blind spots in the neo-republican account of deliberation as well as its theory of non-domination more broadly.

I Deliberation and domination in republican thought

Although republicans have not generally adopted the terminologies of deliberative democracy theorists, deliberation is often presented as an integral aspect of republican citizenship. On some accounts, deliberation is required as a form of virtuous political action and is inherent in any commitment to government based on common goods. According to the historical ideal, virtuous citizens decide based on common interests rather than ‘brute preference or bargained compromise’. ² A deliberative public sphere will help ensure that politics will not simply represent a mechanism for reconciling individual interests, but rather a forum for defining and affirming common goods and shared identities. Deliberation may have a role in defining or discerning common goods (depending on how these are conceived) – in contrast to any teleological account of the common good as a pre-given set of ends. Similarly, since the aims and ends of political community must be defined deliberatively rather than on the basis of pre-political or cultural commonalities, the dispositions and skills of ‘deliberative engagement’ are commonly juxtaposed with cultural solidarity or cohesion as the basis of republican politics. ³

Alternatively, deliberation may have a role in the affirmation and disclosure of individual identity in the public realm. For Arendt, for example, political self-expression is both the essence of political community and a necessary condition for self-realization. Deliberation is not merely a mechanism for reconciling differences; it also provides a forum in which individual identity is intersubjectively confirmed in public space. It does not aim solely at the distribution and organization of social resources, but also at recognition. ⁴ On standard accounts, such deliberation requires a number of pre-conditions – for example, that citizens enjoy the opportunities and resources necessary to participate in public life, such that that they are afforded roughly equal or at least adequate opportunity to articulate their different arguments and perspectives. ⁵

The value of deliberation, for republicans, largely depends on the value accorded to citizenship itself, and in particular on whether civic participation is instrumentally or intrinsically valuable. For Arendt and Taylor, political freedom is understood positively as being realized through political action, and therefore deliberation is in turn an intrinsically valuable activity. For neo-Roman republican thinkers, however – of whom I will take Philip Pettit as the main exemplar – deliberation, along with civic participation more generally, is valued more instrumentally. Since political freedom is conceived of negatively – as the absence of domination, understood as subjection or vulnerability to arbitrary power or ‘alien will’ – the role of deliberation is simply to render public power non-arbitrary and thus non-dominating. For Pettit, unfreedom consists of exposure to the ‘arbitrary, uncheckable power of a dominus or a master in one’s life’. ⁶ Therefore, deliberative citizenship is to be promoted not because it is connected to a privileged conception of human flourishing but only because it is necessary to render public power non-dominating (it prevents imperium or public domination at least, as opposed to interpersonal dominium). Thus, from the perspective of freedom as non-domination, it is more important that agents should have the opportunity to contest political authority – and have equal opportunity to share (jointly) in its control – than to participate directly in its exercise. However, even this relatively conservative sense of contestatory citizenship, as we will see, implies a strong commitment to deliberative practices.

In Pettit’s understanding, persons are dominated (and therefore unfree) to the extent that others possess an unchecked capacity to interfere arbitrarily in their choices (whether or not any such interference is actually suffered). He insists that, contrary to the Benthamite understanding, coercive interference as such carries no ‘initial cost’ for freedom. ⁷ Conversely, coercive state interference is consistent with and supportive of freedom as it is necessary to prevent private domination, but only insofar as it itself remains non-dominating. In turn, in order for state power to be considered as anything other than the imposition of ‘alien will’ – to be non-dominating – it must be non-arbitrary (using the terminology of Pettit’s 1997 book). ⁸ Non-arbitrary coercion must meet a number of interrelated criteria – in particular, that it is exercised in accordance with law rather than at the pleasure of the interfering agent. Crucially, it must be subject to an appropriate and equally shared system of democratic control by the people, supplemented by a system of individualized contestation. ⁹ Thus coercive interference is legitimate where subject to an ultimate (and directive) control by the relevant interferees: democratic control can render public coercion non-dominating by ensuring it is exercised ‘on the people’s terms’. ¹⁰

This conception of democratic control implies a requirement of deliberative practice. For a corporate agent (the ‘people’) to achieve ‘control’, it must be exercised on the basis of common interests or concerns which it defines. In turn, these must be defined deliberately rather than as a pre-given determination. Indeed Pettit has asserted, using various formulations, that in order to render public coercion non-arbitrary and non-dominating, the system of democratic control must ensure that state power tracks interests that its subjects share. ¹¹ Thus ‘political power is non-arbitrary … to the extent that it is forced to track the common avowable interests of members of the society’. ¹² It is thus not sufficient that the state’s coercive power is exercised in regular legal forms and that it is checked and contested through various constitutional and administrative mechanisms. It must also pursue common interests shared by citizens generally, as opposed to, say, particularist sectional interests. State coercion is legitimate if it pursues interests that the interferee shares – or shares equally in defining. For republicans, ‘common avowable interests’ must be defined deliberatively in some sense, rather than through, say, a cruder process of preference-aggregation. For Pettit these interests will be determined through a process of public deliberation which forms part of an overall ‘system of control’ to which citizens have equal access. ¹³ By engaging in contestation of government, we form common projects and concerns, and these represent the deliberative norms to which legitimate government must cleave. Accordingly, citizens form common interests and concerns – which are to impose directive influence on government – as a ‘by-product’ of their interactions in the various sites of democratic contestation. ¹⁴ Pettit distinguishes his republican theory of deliberation from deliberative democratic theories on the basis that deliberation in relation to particular decisions or policies is not intrinsically valuable; rather, deliberation defines the norms which set boundaries on decision-making and regulate acceptable outcomes. ¹⁵ Deliberation is a necessary component of non-dominating democratic self-rule rather than a valuable good as such, and it need not occur at every site of decision-making, but rather represent a sort of background regulation on government.

Thus, deliberation is important for neo-republicans primarily as a means of defining the commonly avowable interests towards which public coercion must be directed in order to render it non-arbitrary and thus non-dominating. Crucially, then, legitimate government must be subject to a system of control which is not only suitably ‘individualized’ and equally shared in its exercise, ¹⁶ but which is also based on interests that are determined through an equally accessible deliberative process. The necessity of a deliberative public sphere stems partly from the fact that, as Pettit affirms, our control over government cannot be ‘personal’, but rather ‘jointly shared’. ¹⁷ It is only by virtue of our membership of a community whose interests we share in deliberating on that it can be legitimate to exercise coercion upon us based on specific interests or policies which we do not individually share or avow.

This potentially introduces several tensions within Pettit’s theory of freedom as non-domination. Although freedom does not require that individuals necessarily participate, it requires that state coercion pursues interests that all citizens have had an opportunity to participate in deliberatively defining. This presupposes a society sufficiently marked by the deliberative (and therefore participative) dispositions that are required in order to orient state power towards interests that can plausibly be described as ‘common’. This raises questions concerning not only equality but also stability and motivation: not only, then, about how collective deliberation ought to be structured, how it can account for our varying capacities and perspectives, and how individual interests can be expressed and pursued in a deliberative framework – but also about how it might be practised to such an extent that it actually succeeds in imposing a collective, directive influence on the state. Larmore ponders:

… how should the interests of the individual be ascertained? Is it a matter of the interests which the individual herself avows? And if so, what is the nature of the circumstances in which her own declarations count as authoritative? Or is it a matter instead of her ‘real’ interests, of which she may or may not have any grasp? ¹⁸

Finally, while most deliberative theorists tend to ‘cast matters in terms of the universal right, capacity, or opportunity to deliberate, rather than actual exercise of that right’, ²³ this also holds true for the neo-republican variant. Therefore, a salient question is what equality in deliberative participation can mean in a context where barriers to participation may be located neither in institutional structure nor in natural ability and inclination – but rather in habitus and symbolic power.

II Symbolic power in Rousseau and Bourdieu

This article argues that Bourdieu’s and Rousseau’s understanding of political deliberation as a site of symbolic violence reveals certain problems in the neo-republican account of deliberative citizenship. First, I will outline and compare Rousseau’s and Bourdieu’s accounts of symbolic power in social practice generally. This in turn informs their shared understanding of political deliberation as a site of domination and symbolic violence.

Pierre Bourdieu’s work is centrally concerned with how social hierarchies are expressed and reproduced in social practices. ²⁴ For Bourdieu, habitus is the set of durable dispositions, tastes and preferences – learned but unconscious – which orients our actions and practices towards the social structures and socio-cultural contexts within which we operate. ²⁵ Our practices emerge from the interaction between the habitus and various ‘fields’ – competitive sites of social interaction structured around the creation, distribution and exchange of various forms of capital. Our subjectivity is formed through negotiating these fields. Correspondingly Bourdieu theorizes that taste, preference and culture are never ‘disinterested’, but rather serve a function of social distinction within discrete fields that place value on certain forms of knowledge and competence. Cultural and leisure activities thus provide forms of social and symbolic capital. Our tastes and practices serve partly to distance us from lower groups, ²⁶ yet social structures are ‘naturalized’ as they are integrated and reproduced in bodily and linguistic practices. Therefore we experience a sort of false consciousness (‘misrecognition’) by understanding our social practices as neutral, natural and apolitical. Institutions help to fix the ‘value’ of social ‘products’, to (unequally) distribute these, and to foster a belief in their natural value. ²⁷

Thus for Bourdieu, power relations in society are constituted by the distribution and exchange of non-economic as well as economic capital. Social symbols – symbols of value, legitimacy and prestige – underlie relations of hierarchy and domination. Symbolic power means the power to determine legitimacy in categories of taste and disposition and to impose hierarchies of value and prestige. Symbolic violence refers to the insidious or invisible character of that power. Symbolic domination refers to the power of certain groups to maintain and reproduce social hierarchies by imposing their evaluative schemata – and thus forms of unconscious, invisible discipline – within the dispositions and assumptions of dominated agents. ²⁸

Rousseau, in many obvious ways a very different theorist, is also centrally concerned with how power relations in politics and society are structured around the distribution of non-economic capital. In the Second Discourse he considered how, in tandem with the development of propertied society, inequality has assumed potent symbolic forms. ²⁹ Since Rousseau identified servitude with subjection to alien will, he defined political freedom as government by the general will, the corporate will of the community directed towards the common good of its members. ³⁰ He was preoccupied not only with the institutional structures but also with the social frameworks and personal virtues through which a politics based on common goods might be realized. Consequently he was fundamentally concerned that a society marked by symbolically encoded inequalities could not host the politics of the general will.

Rousseau rejected liberty as non-interference partly because he identified the latent, almost invisible forms of domination that persist in highly differentiated, liberal societies. For Rousseau, insidious social hierarchies are embedded in ostensibly mundane social practices – in everyday manners, tastes and dispositions. In the Second Discourse he hypothesizes that when the first societies formed, ‘a value came to be attached to public esteem … [to] whoever sang or danced best, [or] was the most eloquent … and this was the first step towards inequality’. ³¹ Man’s ‘rank and condition’ came to depend not only on his ‘property and power’, but also on his ‘wit, beauty and talent’ – attributes which it became necessary to ‘possess or affect’. ³² Thus the need for recognition sowed the seeds of domination, as we begin to ‘live in the opinion of others’. ³³ Like Bourdieu, Rousseau understood that in increasingly complex societies, the need to exercise domination directly in interpersonal relationships diminished: ³⁴ thus as inequality assumed institutional forms, institutions equally became implicated in the distribution of symbolic capital as the powerful ‘disguise their usurpations’. ³⁵ Our need for symbolic capital is driven by amour-propre – the potentially destructive self-love that arises in propertied civilization, which substitutes our natural love of self with a craving for external approbation and esteem, compelling us to seek status and distinction relative to others. Consequently, ‘each senses his existence not in himself, but in his relationship to those whom he perceives as other’. ³⁶ Just as for Bourdieu, the habitus orients our practices towards social and cultural capital, for Rousseau, our cultural, ritual and leisure practices are an expression of amour-propre. He affirms ‘the taste for arts and letters originates in … the desire for distinction’. ³⁷ He observed how in early-modern conditions, ‘leisured cosmopolitans’ seek to ‘please and win recognition from others’ ³⁸ – a tendency he saw as inimical to republican virtues, as arts and culture see virtue replaced with ‘decorum and propriety’. ³⁹ His writings are infused with a disdain for the ritual theatricality of liberal urban life, for the phoney mannerisms and affectations that he sees as instruments of distinction and hierarchy and thus as destructive for republican politics.

Like Bourdieu, Rousseau also identifies the political importance of the field of cultural production – complaining that ‘the arbiters of opinion and taste in a people become the arbiters of its actions’. ⁴⁰ His sense of the political significance of the mundane – specifically of manners and rituals – arguably presages Bourdieu’s conception of bodily hexis as those learned manners and bodily techniques which communicate and affirm social status. Thus, Rousseau’s distinctive cultural politics – especially his politics of speech and dress ⁴¹ – echoes Bourdieu’s assertion that power relations are embedded ‘in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body’. ⁴² Similarly Rousseau’s account of amour-propre – as corruptible self-love consummated in recognition by others – has parallels in Bourdieu’s portrayal of habitus as the set of dispositions which orient our practices towards the attainment of positional capital. Amour-propre, in Rousseau’s account, is expressed and exercised though symbolic exchanges. It compels individuals to perform the requirements of symbolic legitimacy, through the practices and dispositions which are valued in specific social fields. In turn, like Bourdieu he recognizes that these techniques and competences (‘spurious passions’ ⁴³ ) have an essentially arbitrary value when considered independently of the status they confer in such fields.

Therefore, for Rousseau as for Bourdieu, social power is located in essentially arbitrary forms of know-how, internalized and expressed in bodily and linguistic dispositions which serve as coded (albeit unconscious) signifiers of status. Symbolic violence helps to maintain and reproduce these arbitrary symbolic classifications as they are internalized and naturalized by dominated as well as dominating agents. Therefore, like Bourdieu, Rousseau understood that aesthetics and taste have a deeply political dimension through their role in the reproduction of social order. In his Discourses, Rousseau demonstrates that inequality is perpetuated through complex social practices as well as more obvious institutional mechanisms. In the First Discourse, he decried the ‘inequality introduced among men by distinctions of talent’, ⁴⁴ and in the Second Discourse described propertied bourgeois society as a ‘frenzy for distinction’. ⁴⁵ His analysis of 18th-century social rituals presaged Bourdieu’s claim that ‘art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously or deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences’. ⁴⁶ He shows a similar sense of how social hierarchies are internalized and exercised in our bodily and linguistic dispositions – in speech, manners and dress. ⁴⁷ He describes how following the emergence of amour-propre in propertied civilization, the ‘great and rich’ distinguish themselves and secure their status by creating ‘a different symbolic universe’ and ‘trapping the rest into believing’. ⁴⁸ Thus like Bourdieu, he appreciates the often imperceptible, even invisible nature of those inequalities and hierarchies that are encoded in ritual and symbolic form: he notes ‘the devouring ambition … the desire to place oneself above others, inspiring … a surreptitious envy which is all the more dangerous for the fact that it is often masked as benevolent’. ⁴⁹ In a remarkably similar understanding, Bourdieu notes that symbolic classifications are efficacious because ‘they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny’. ⁵⁰ He claims that ‘dominated agents … tend to attribute to themselves what the distribution [of value and status] attributes to them, reproducing in their verdict on themselves the verdict [pronounced] on them’. ⁵¹ Rousseau’s concern is, similarly, that we identify natural authority in refined manners and dispositions – that arbitrary social classifications are mistaken as natural and innocent. For both, a central problem of politics is that status and authority are symbolically insinuated and thus naturalized.

Thus, Rousseau’s eccentric communitarian politics stems largely from his sense that, in the early-modern context, increasing social differentiation would give rise to new – and more indivisible – axes of symbolic distinction, ⁵² and thus that symbolic domination would acquire newly potent, but also peculiarly insidious, forms. Symbolic power in social practice is intimately linked with domination and unfreedom in politics. This explains the strong focus on social policy in his projects of constitutional design for Corsica and Poland. ⁵³ Rousseau is concerned with symbolic violence in social practice primarily because he believes that by driving individuals to pursue distinction (or capital) in competitive social fields, it would undermine the virtues needed for a politics of the general will. Indeed, he thought the general will could be realized only in relatively undifferentiated, austere societies, based on autarkic, preferably agrarian economies with little commerce. Austerity, he thought, would discourage complex cultural pursuits and encoded bourgeois rituals, promoting simple, inclusive republican festivities instead. ⁵⁴

For Rousseau the central problem of politics was how individuals’ pervasive and ineradicable need for symbolic status and approbation – which normally translated to complex patterns of domination – could be reconciled to, and even positively sustain, a politics based on common goods. Accordingly his politics of austerity was aimed at ensuring a ‘transparency’ ⁵⁵ in social practice which would foil the encoded status hierarchies he thought so destructive for republican politics. He hoped that the insidious domination wrought by complex social ritualism could be foiled by redirecting the object of amour-propre towards the public and the political, ‘making the community itself a source of the esteem individuals [seek]’. ⁵⁶ His constitutional prescriptions were partly aimed at channelling citizens’ need for status and symbolic recognition towards the political realm itself – deploying an alternative form of symbolic power consistent with the politics of the general will. In Poland and Corsica, an array of prizes, ceremonies, public approbations, games and other devices and incentives ⁵⁷ would help to ensure that public esteem – and hence, amour-propre – would attach to civic virtue itself. Thus Rousseau’s constitutionalism aims to manipulate amour-propre so as to reconcile and accommodate our desire for symbolic status, ordinarily a source of domination, to a non-dominating form of republican politics – such that civic virtue and amour-propre are not only reconciled, but conjoined. In the Second Discourse he suggests it is the very ‘frenzy for distinction’ to which we owe ‘the best as well as the worst’ of ourselves. ⁵⁸ His conjecture is that individuals’ tendency to internalize symbolic classifications in their practices – coupled with their need for social approbation – can positively support republican socialization: indeed his strategy echoes Bourdieu’s claim that ‘symbols are the instrument par excellence of social integration’. ⁵⁹

Rousseau’s understanding of the role of symbolic power in republican socialization bears remarkable resemblance to Bourdieu’s account of habitus:

… through the exclusions and inclusions, unions and divisions … which govern the social structure and the structuring force it exerts, through all the hierarchies and classifications inscribed in objects (especially cultural products), in institutions or simply in language, and through all the judgements, verdicts, gradings and warnings imposed by the institutions specially designed for this purpose … or constantly arising from the meetings and interactions of everyday life, the social order is progressively inscribed in people’s minds. ⁶⁰

Indeed, Rosenberg argues that deliberative democracy theories fail to recognize the cognitive limits of our deliberative capacities, and so understate the role of emotional ties in political communication:

… it seems unrealistic to assume that a commitment to fairly consider another’s concerns can be based simply on the recognition that another person, as a thinking, sentient personality [is] … equally deserving of attention and consideration [or] to assume that a commitment to a common good will emerge solely on the basis of reflections on what is ethical and reasonable. ⁶⁴

III Political deliberation and symbolic violence

Rousseau is concerned, on the one hand, by the limits of abstract political discourse (along with language itself) as a mechanism for legitimate government – hence his emphasis on pageantry, rituals and symbols. However, he also understands political language (as well as language generally) as positively inflicting domination. He understands that language is never a neutral medium, but rather a social practice that reflects and reproduces social hierarchies – ‘a weapon to leave individuals in a state of befuddled inferiority’. ⁶⁹

Rousseau’s apprehension of political deliberation must be seen in light of his broader understanding of specialized social practices as sites of symbolic distinction which harbour insidious but potent forms of domination. As discussed, he observed how, in tandem with increasing social differentiation, cultural and intellectual practices assumed increasingly complex and specialized, exclusivist forms. Correspondingly, classifications of value and merit become deeply encoded, requiring elaborate but essentially arbitrary forms of learning. He opined that music, for example, had (in Dobel’s terms) been ‘taken away from the community and made into a ponderous academic discipline’. ⁷⁰ Like Bourdieu, Rousseau extended this analysis to intellectual life itself: ideas – but also, their styles of articulation – provide forms of positional capital. ⁷¹ Similarly, ‘whereas [Sartre and Foucault] used their intellectual capital primarily in the broader politics of society, Bourdieu has aimed his critical arsenal … at the forms of tyranny … that threaten the intellectual field itself’. ⁷²

Essentially Rousseau applies a similar analysis to political deliberation as a specialized social practice. He is concerned that ostensibly rational political discourse – sterile ‘sophistry’ – will in reality represent a highly encoded ritual oriented towards social distinction, and, thus, become an insidious site of political and social domination. His insight, similar to Bourdieu’s, is that participation in political discourse requires specialized but essentially arbitrary competences. Complex political discourse serves to confer an illusion of intellectual sophistication and thus of social prestige on its practitioners. In complex differentiated societies – even the early-modern context in which Rousseau writes – culture and art become specialized, self-referential pursuits with arbitrary classifications of value that confer symbolic capital on specialized practitioners – and political discourse begins to fulfil much the same function. Thus, while ‘music migrates to the concert hall [and] ritual public action … to the theatre’, by the same measure ‘citizens no longer meet in open courtyards surrounded by symbols to deliberate’. ⁷³ In turn, authentic republican actions become impossible where political speech itself represents merely a game of social distinction. Rousseau’s concern is partly that sophisticated discursive strategies will be used to present sectional and self-interest in the phraseologies of the common good – and that such rhetoric will dupe even those deploying it. ⁷⁴ Thus his distinctive insight was that domination by factional interest – historically a central republican concern – could be rendered insidious, almost invisible, in complex social and linguistic codes.

Famously, Rousseau saw adversarial deliberation and complex political debate as harbingers of corruption and civic decay. He was concerned that complex deliberation would foster manipulation and deception and thus frustrate the discernment of the general will. He even insists: ‘[I]t is essential, for the general will to express itself … that each citizen think only his own thoughts.’ ⁷⁵ He even speculates that if fully informed citizens ‘had no communication with each another’, the general will would prevail. ⁷⁶ He presents ‘political subtleties’ (implicitly, sophisticated discourse) as undermining equality. ⁷⁷ ‘Simple and upright men’, he affirms, cannot be ‘duped’ – and thus implicitly cannot be dominated – by such sophistry, by ‘refined flourishes’. ⁷⁸ In turn, I have argued this apprehension is linked to a broader appreciation of the salience of symbolic power generally in increasingly complex early-modern social practices. Accordingly Rousseau’s constitutional prescriptions are not oriented towards acculturating citizens in complex deliberative skills. Instead, he aims, through a politics of austerity, to preserve the ‘simple’ virtues which he assumes sufficient to the discernment of the general will. Civic virtue, then, is not associated with devotion to politics understood as a discrete, specialized activity. Rather, it requires us to practise a broader set of virtues – across the whole of life – such that solidarity and civic love can be maintained in our political community. Correspondingly corruption encompasses the subtle domination inflicted by the specialized social practices that occur outside the narrow realm of politics.

In some accounts, the general will is in fact discerned through deliberative practices. This makes sense if the general will is conceived of procedurally rather than as having a transcendent, fixed content. On this view, the general will equates to a set of decisions formulated through a deliberative procedure which filters out sectional and personal interests. ⁷⁹ Sreenivisan argues the general will is ‘the totality of unrescinded decisions made by a community … when its deliberation is subject to certain restraints’. ⁸⁰ These deliberative constraints give expression to citizens’ moral and contractual equality and mark the passage from natural to moral freedom. Alternatively, if instead the general will encompasses fixed common interests that precede any democratic procedure, it can still be argued that these transcendent interests can be discerned only through a form of deliberation (subject to similar constraints).

This deliberative conception of the general will seems to contradict Rousseau’s aversion to deliberative practices. Certainly he is concerned that sophisticated political discourse may effectuate a sort of symbolic violence by duping those with insufficient access to the relevant techniques and terminologies. Yet the general will is discerned deliberatively in quite a different sense: it requires that individuals reflectively evaluate their preferences and opinions with reference to the common good of their community – to reason abstractly from the symmetrical standpoint we adopt as citizens, filtering out the ‘pluses and minuses’ that constitute our contingent features and resources. In turn, Rousseau’s conjecture is that this specific form of deliberative public reason can be fostered not through any acculturation in specific deliberative skills that are to be exercised in a discrete political domain – but rather through the austerity which he believes can foil symbolic violence in social practice generally. He suggests the general will is discernible ‘only through good sense’ – figuratively, by ‘peasants gathered under an oak’. ⁸¹ Thus he does not seek to eliminate deliberation altogether, notwithstanding apparent suggestions to the contrary in certain passages. Neither does he even intend, necessarily, that individual citizens’ reasoning should be uncorrupted by communication or discussion. Instead he is simply concerned that deliberation should not assume the form of a specialized social ritual with encoded terminologies and symbolisms of the sort that tend to mystify and exclude the uninitiated who lack the requisite techniques and competences. His concern, then, is that deliberation should occur in a social context in which, absent the relevant forms of symbolic complexity, it will not likely inflict the sorts of insidious domination with which he is concerned.

To some degree, Rousseau envisages that patriotic ritual action should substitute complex deliberation – the ‘sophists’ sterile babbling’ ⁸² – thus offering an alternative, less corruptible outlet for political expression. At one level, he simply prefers experiential participation to passive spectatorship, which he regards as corrupted and hypocritical. Thus passive discourse can be seen in the same light as the bourgeois theatre-goers he castigates in Letter to d’Alembert: ‘make spectators the actors’, ⁸³ Rousseau affirms. However, alternatively ritualism aids ‘deliberation’ in the sense considered above, by giving citizens concrete experiential and visual representation for ‘public meanings’. ⁸⁴

Thus, a healthy republican society is not one characterized by a widespread deliberative rationality, but rather one unified by a common symbolic universe. Republican citizens must sing, dance and rejoice together, not simply deliberate rationally for the purposes of social cooperation. Republican participation is performative and experiential as well as deliberative. Political deliberation is at least structured and contained, if not supplanted outright, by a kind of symbolic and ritual communion the sort of which is impossible to envisage under late-modern social conditions. Far from the mild ceremonials of contemporary states, ⁸⁵ this ritualism will pervade all of social life as ‘the many societies become one’. ⁸⁶ This republican ritualism – perhaps simply a gathering around ‘a crown of flowers in the square’ ⁸⁷ – can occur only in a sufficiently austere and undifferentiated society. ⁸⁸ Only in this sort of austere society, egalitarian and fraternal, can the appropriate deliberative virtues be fostered, and symbolic violence foiled.

Rousseau’s symbolic and ritualistic emphases serve as a counterpoint to Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality as conferring legitimacy on political authority. ⁸⁹ Indeed it seems his ritualism, eschewing the centrality of the rational in politics, is aimed at effectuating a sort of beguilery or enchantment. At one level, he shares the insight of contemporary deliberative-democracy sceptics concerning language and rationality –that language, by its nature, is always shaped by social power relations, ⁹⁰ such that an ‘ideal speech situation’ could never function as a regulatory ideal. Moreover, he assumes that a community divided along symbolic and affective lines cannot realize non-dominating self-rule irrespective of deliberative rationality. Whereas complex political deliberation can mystify and befuddle, a common symbolic life will foster the solidarities of self-government. And while pervasive public ritualism might seem oppressive, it can alternatively be understood as means for the state ‘to maintain its legitimacy without incessant resort to manipulation or violence’. ⁹¹

In one sense, austerity will lessen the need for complex deliberation simply by erasing the differences that usually necessitate it. However, this will be achieved through neither coercion, nor austerity’s dour constraints, but rather, counter-intuitively, through pleasure – through the ‘intoxicating’ passion and joy that republican rituals and symbols will foster. In republican festivities, Rousseau says citizens will ‘surrender themselves to the sweet sentiment of happiness’. ⁹² The intoxicating togetherness of civic revelry – distinct from any cultural homogeneity – erases our need for symbolic distinction, and, correspondingly, removes much of our need to deliberate. This contradicts the commonplace understanding of deliberation as a mechanism for reconciling, overcoming, or affirming identitarian difference ⁹³ – an understanding in which such difference is itself taken as a given. However, for Rousseau, political freedom is not realized through any fair or just procedure for reconciling deep-seated identitarian differences – simply because he perceives the formation (and perception) of such differences as the product of amour-propre.

Therefore, the purpose of his politics is to construct a social vision in which amour-propre is no longer directed towards private sources of distinction. This is based on his sense that happiness – and political freedom – are achieved only when ‘self and other [are] united in a single whole’ ⁹⁴ – this being perhaps the true meaning of his seemingly severe assertion that ‘the only true joy is public’. ⁹⁵ For Arendt, ‘the problem of politics is not when people are different, but when they are unable to communicate’. ⁹⁶ But Rousseau, like Bourdieu, focuses on how political communication itself inflicts domination. Therefore, politics is not negated when we are unable to communicate, but rather when communication itself leads to befuddlement, alienation and loss of identity. Arendt, also, notes the pleasure and spontaneity of political action, ‘the joy and gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed’. ⁹⁷ However, while for Arendt political voice and expression are the cornerstone of the just political community, for Rousseau they threaten to undermine it, and so he prefers ritual and symbolic affirmations of commonality that foreclose much of the supposed need for deliberative engagement. For Arendt, politics is largely ‘a matter of individual distinction and identity’. ⁹⁸ And while her sense of republican citizenship is not simply a matter of crude ‘self-display’ – or a mechanism for disclosing pre-determined identities ⁹⁹ – nonetheless, it is this very feature of political expression – our dependency on external recognition for our sense of self – which, for Rousseau, harbours and inflicts domination. Thus Rousseau rejects our most commonplace understandings of political deliberation not solely because of the dominating potential of its arbitrary codes and techniques, but also – at least implicitly – because he impugns the very conception of difference underlying it. Deliberation cannot have the formative function of crystallizing and reconciling differences in individual identity; instead it serves only to articulate the common interests of a cohesive community. The more we ‘deliberate’ based on an understanding of our difference that stems from a corrupted amour-propre, the more we are distanced figuratively from the austere peasants deliberating ‘under an ‘oak’.

Rousseau’s understanding of political deliberation as a source of domination bears close resemblance to Bourdieu’s account of political discourse generally as a site of symbolic violence. First, since they share the insight that since linguistic meaning cannot be analysed outside of social and political power relations, they are both sceptical as to any view of deliberative rationality as a normative benchmark for political freedom. For Bourdieu as for Rousseau, language generally is an instrument of social power which unconsciously and invisibly imposes arbitrary classifications of legitimacy and value. ¹⁰⁰ For both, the classifications and techniques of intellectual life generally serve to provide a sort of encoded currency for recognition and distinction among specialized practitioners. Both view politics as a site of symbolic production, and political discourse, with its specialized techniques and vocabularies, is an encoded social practice typically monopolized or dominated by those inducted in the ‘hegemonic idiom’. ¹⁰¹

Second, both may challenge the focus of deliberative democracy (and other) theorists on identitarian differences – suggesting that the main barrier to effective political deliberation is not differential identity, but rather differential habitus. Olson argues that the ‘differentiating presuppositions’ which Bourdieu identifies in discourse are rooted in ‘group identities’, and moreover that these do not necessarily contradict ‘universalizing’ presuppositions of reciprocity and equal respect. In fact they may ‘provide a different kind of intelligibility’ through ‘their implicit coding of identity’. ¹⁰² Thus, since differentiating signifiers crystallize and affirm group identity, they are ‘intimately connected with the flow of ideas in the public sphere’. ¹⁰³ This might imply that deliberative signifiers (such as articulatory style) are connected to the identitarian differences which many theorists locate at the centre of the deliberative democratic enterprise. Yet these differentiating signifiers – which determine the ‘competence’ that we attribute to deliberative contributions – should not be understood primarily in terms of their role, whether benign or otherwise, in crystallizing group identities. This would overlook the subtle hierarchies these inflict throughout and within what we conventionally understand as identitarian groups. From the Bourdieusian perspective, the problem is not that deliberators will reject each other as formally equal on grounds of identitarian difference – or even that they will be too indifferent – but rather that they will evaluate contributions to discourse based on a sense of legitimacy that is embodied in signifiers as arbitrary and mundane as accent, intonation, or bodily poise – the ‘embodied character of speech’. ¹⁰⁴

Third, both thinkers can also be contrasted with theorists who understand political ‘voice’ as integral to the affirmation and recognition of individual identity and thus to political freedom. Topper argues that while Arendt focuses on the political consequences of citizens’ ‘loss of voice’, Bourdieu is more centrally concerned by ‘the often inconspicuous ways in which language itself becomes a mechanism of silencing, domination, or exclusion’. ¹⁰⁵ Arendt, Topper suggests, overlooks the political significance of ‘social distinctions embodied in and expressed through speech’. ¹⁰⁶ Bourdieu, in contrast, shows that ‘domination and exclusion are enacted through concrete linguistic exchanges’. ¹⁰⁷ Thus political discourse potentially harbours ‘gentle’ and ‘inconspicuous’ ¹⁰⁸ violence in which status-hierarchies are unconsciously enforced and reproduced. In general terms, agents are dominated where they lack ‘the linguistic competences valorized in a particular social or institutional domain’. ¹⁰⁹ Political speech constitutes its own self-referential competences which inflict befuddlement and exclusion – and ultimately help secure the ‘domestication of the dominated’. ¹¹⁰ The know-how required for deliberative participation is essentially arbitrary in value – it lies partly in agents’ ‘articulatory style’ – especially the linguistic and bodily techniques – which subtly encodes social classifications. ¹¹¹ I describe these deliberative techniques as being ‘arbitrary’ in value because on the one hand, they are not techniques of reasoning ability, but rather competences that are necessary in order to enter and to be heard in a specific deliberative site, and because on the other, their differential use and acquisition are a function of socialization and habitus rather than of unequal reasoning abilities.

For Bourdieu, deliberative competence is the ability to command attention, to be listened to in a linguistic ‘market’; ¹¹² the challenge he raises for deliberative democracy theorists is that we are evaluated in deliberation not on the basis of how we reason, but how we speak. Indeed, Hayward has demonstrated that the persuasiveness of political speech depends on its ‘form’ and ‘style’ that are linked to the dominant habitus – and that this inequality cannot be remedied or overcome by the standard safeguards proposed by deliberative democracy theorists. ¹¹³ Deliberative capacity is assessed in reality based on ‘social dynamics’, not ‘abstract cognitive and communicative capability’. ¹¹⁴ Furthermore, Bourdieu contests Habermas’ conception of an ‘ideal speech situation’ in which the ‘rational character of communicative action would be unhindered by social constraints’ – because ‘whatever power of force speech acts possess is … ascribed to them by the social institution of the utterance of which the speech act is part’. ¹¹⁵ Thus, discourse is above all the exercise of a ‘social competence’. ¹¹⁶

Rousseau similarly fears that since language cannot be understood prior to its communicative context, political deliberation will represent a highly encoded form of social competition (and distinction) rather than a genuine exercise in public reason. For both, political expression cannot be conceptualized primarily as a form of ‘identity disclosure’, ¹¹⁷ because we do not use political speech primarily to disclose our identities in the Arendtian sense, but rather to distinguish ourselves. Both share the insight, described by Kohn, that ‘miscommunication and manipulation are not accidental … but part of the nature of language itself’. ¹¹⁸ Thus ‘while Arendt extols the way that words and public speech bond and constitute political communities, Bourdieu explores the ways in which they quietly wound and dissolve them’. ¹¹⁹ And like Rousseau, Bourdieu also then questions ‘the basis on which any shared or authorized language is constituted and hence the basis of politics itself’. ¹²⁰ Just as Bourdieu depicts lawyers’ doctrinal argument as a struggle for symbolic capital over the designation of correct or true meanings, ¹²¹ Rousseau is similarly concerned that deliberation on the common interest will become appropriated to an expertist domain (populated by the dreaded ‘sophists’) which reproduces itself through exclusionary codes and specialized, esoteric idioms. Since both understand that the social validity of speech acts is determined by an arbitrary linguistic market rather than by any pre-social yardstick of rationality, both are concerned, whether implicitly or explicitly, that deliberation on the common good will effectively be confined to those possessing legitimate or high-status – but essentially arbitrary – linguistic competences and techniques. Indeed in self-consciously ‘republican’ polities – for example, France – political discourse tends to operate based on a set of republican idioms about public affairs (vivre-ensemble, repli identitaire, etc). ¹²² Thus, participation in consciously republican discourses requires the learning of idiomatic terminologies which, to some extent, reflect and re-enforce a given status quo. Political discourse may not impose the same obvious barriers, particularly the forms and formalities, associated with, say, legal discourse, but this means simply that the salient barriers to meaningful intervention – the ostensibly mundane bodily techniques of manner and accent (the ‘feel of the game’) – are all the more invisible.

IV Symbolic power and domination: Neo-republican blind spots

Insofar as the Rousseauan and Bourdieusian accounts demonstrate the salience of symbolic violence in political deliberation, they reveal significant problems in the neo-republican understanding of freedom as non-domination as being based (in part) on deliberative politics.

As outlined in the first section, neo-republicans (with Rousseau) understand unfreedom, roughly speaking, as the subjection of individual choice to alien will. Domination may occur in private relationships marked by disparities of bargaining power, even where no actual interference occurs; alternatively, public coercion dominates unless it is subject to an individualized and equally shared system of control, complemented by avenues of individual contestation. ¹²³ Correspondingly, neo-republicans assume public and private domination can be minimized through appropriate systems of rule of law and democratic control which track ‘commonly avowed interests’.

Crucially, as discussed, republicans ascribe a central role to political deliberation as a criterion for non-domination in public coercion. For Pettit, public interference is non-dominating where, rather than being exercised at the pleasure of or with impunity by the interfering agent, it is subject to an equally accessible system of control by its subjects which functions so as to track their commonly avowable interests. This requires a procedure for determining what counts as ‘commonly avowable interests’, and in turn this necessitates some form of public deliberation in which citizens’ interests and voices are given at least roughly equal weight and opportunity for articulation.

From both the Rousseauan and the Bourdieusian perspectives, this ignores or at least significantly underestimates the symbolic violence latent in political discourse and, thus, the potentially dominating nature of political deliberation itself.

First, for both Rousseau and Bourdieu domination cannot be understood solely as the subjection of choice to alien interference. Compared with the neo-republicans, Rousseau views domination as more intractably embedded in the production and exchange of symbolic, cultural and social capital. It stems partly from the need for external recognition which ‘natural’ man experiences once he enters society and develops amour-propre. As Gauthier notes, Rousseau’s insight is essentially that ‘dependence on another person is … not simply dependence on his power; most deeply, it is dependence on his recognition’. ¹²⁴ Thus domination is exercised and experienced through ‘positional goods’ ¹²⁵ – in hierarchies constituted by taste, bodily dispositions and techniques, and the know-how needed to negotiate symbolic codes.

This essentially highlights the commonality of his understanding with Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power. For both, domination is irreducible to our subjection to others’ powers of interference, as per the neo-republican account. Rather, it stems fundamentally from the fact that our sense of self is dependent on symbolic classifications determined by arbitrary external forces. We are dominated partly because (for Rousseau at least) our choices and identities lack authenticity where they are the product of social competition for symbolic capital, and, thus, of corrupted amour-propre. We are forced to feign behaviours which attract status and legitimacy. Therefore unfreedom cannot be understood as the subjection of choice to alien will, if ‘choice’ stems from a fundamental sort of corruption which is itself dominating. Rousseau’s thought is distinct from Bourdieu’s because he seeks to devise a specific political and constitutional project in which this domination is erased through the sources of symbolic distinction being rendered common and transparent. His sense of the intractability of domination in symbolic and ritual form means his prescription, compared with the neo-republicans’, is correspondingly more drastic; indeed, his politics of austerity would seem to risk engendering equally potent forms of domination, ‘transform[ing] personal dependence into dependence on the Republic’. ¹²⁶ Just as subjection to the general will substitutes dependence on the whole for dependence on capricious individual wills, subjection to the transparent symbolic power of the republican state is preferable, he conjectures, to the symbolic violence wrought by the encoded private rituals of more complex, differentiated societies. (Of course while Rousseauan austerity might prevent dependency on capricious particularist recognition, citizens will still be subject to the arbiters of symbolic legitimacy in republican society.)

Second, Pettit under-accounts for symbolic domination in the range of ‘choices’ it is deemed most necessary to safeguard from domination. Pettit notes ‘the possible modes of subjection are many and diverse’, ¹²⁷ and insists the republican state must guard against domination only ‘in respect of certain choices’ which are deemed significant – particularly those choices pertaining to the traditional domain of the ‘basic liberties’. ¹²⁸ This delineation (perhaps any delineation) of the choices most deserving of non-domination arbitrarily discounts the significance of symbolic power – particularly in respect of culture and taste – as potentially important aspects of domination in liberal society. It overlooks the role of status hierarchies embedded in habitus and cultural practice – inequalities which may both represent an important source of interpersonal domination, while undermining the deliberation thought necessary in a non-dominating politics. This neglect is all the more remarkable given Pettit’s emphasis on a ‘status’ citizenship which should, intuitively, account for the importance of recognition. Undominated citizens will, he says, ‘walk tall, live without shame or indignity, and look one another in the eye without any reason for fear or deference’. ¹²⁹ Consequently it seems odd to discount those forms of dependency and domination which stem from the differential distribution of symbolic capital. His theory of freedom appeals to a social world in which, far from the classical liberal society, citizens ‘do not have to bow or scrape, toady or kowtow, fawn or flatter’, where they are ‘their own men and women’. ¹³⁰ Pettit suggests an ‘eyeball test’ as a criterion for social non-domination – that is, whether, given our relative resources and powers, we can look our fellows in the eye without need for ingratiation or deference. ¹³¹ However he insists this test cannot account for our being unable to look others in the eye based simply on our timidity or natural deference, as opposed to real obstacles stemming from others’ powers of interference. From the Bourdieusian perspective, this naturalizes dispositions of ‘timidity’ – ignoring the befuddlement and exclusion which stem from unequal distributions of symbolic capital and which structure our seemingly inane interactions. People may decline to participate deliberatively simply because since they are not ‘native’ practitioners of the ‘hegemonic idiom’, they may both ‘seem less competent to others’ and ‘internalize this incompetence’ in their attitudes to politics. ¹³² Indeed Bourdieu’s perspective is that the ‘ordinary violences’ of social practice ‘are … inconspicuous and “gentle” [and] they defy the standard liberal dichotomies of freedom and constraint, will and coercion’. ¹³³

Third, neo-republicans’ attempt to understand domination in terms of alien control of choice takes ‘choice’ itself, somewhat uncritically, at face value. In Pettit’s analysis, for a given choice to be dominated it is necessary that it is subject either to ‘interference’ (of particular kinds) or the apprehension thereof. This ignores how a given choice – although undominated in this sense – may, in the Bourdieusian (or indeed Rousseauan) perspective, be the product of an agent’s requirement for recognition and capital in the competitive ‘fields’ of liberal society. It is a concern for this deeper dimension of domination that underlies Rousseau’s politics of austerity – the very ‘communitarian’ bent from which neo-republicans’ apprehension of his legacy usually stems. ¹³⁴ Yet these critics largely ignore those forms of domination against which his ‘communitarian’ strategies are directed. In Bourdieusian terms, Pettit effectively naturalizes ‘choice’, failing sufficiently to consider how choice itself – the unimpeachable bed-rock of non-domination – may in some important respects be a function of dominating social structures.

Fourth and most pertinently, the Rousseauan and Bourdieusian perspectives seem to undermine the idea that appropriate deliberative practices can render public power non-dominating by orienting it towards commonly avowed interests. In Pettit’s analysis, the role of deliberation is both to define ‘common avowable interests’ and thus to undergird an ‘equally accessible’ form of popular influence and control. ¹³⁵ He argues that a republican model of democratic control requires not only popular influence, but also popular direction of government. This requires him to argue, against most standard analyses of democracy, that the people can form a set of objectives or interests which give government this directive influence: thus he argues that common interests emerge through the exercise of democratic contestation. ¹³⁶

The Rousseauan perspective – with its focus on the gentle violence latent in political discourse – challenges this neo-republican conception of public deliberation as the bed-rock of non-dominating state power. For Rousseau, the common interest should be clear in the austere, fraternal and undifferentiated society; complex deliberative practices serve only to obscure it. Cognizant of how, in a complex differentiated society, political deliberation will represent a sort of competitive, symbolically encoded game, Rousseau also views the very differences which make deliberation necessary as themselves being the product of dominating social structures. This does not mean that he embraces cultural or non-political solidarities as a precondition for a more authentic republican deliberation. Rather, his insight is simply that, at least in what we can roughly term a liberal society, political discourse will be too beset by a symbolically encoded complexity to host a deliberative politics that can meaningfully be said to define and articulate common interests. While Pettit assumes that norms of ‘civility’ will suffice to stabilize the politics of non-domination, Rousseau’s insight is to illustrate how such thin constraints may prove not only insufficient, but illusory, in complex societies where domination assumes mundane, innocuous forms.

From the Bourdieusian perspective, similarly, Pettit’s optimistic viewpoint overlooks various ways in which political expression can insidiously inflict symbolic violence such that public deliberation, however procedurally constituted, could never be said to offer meaningfully equal opportunities for input and thus to define genuinely ‘common’ interests, identities and concerns. In particular, this stems from the differential distribution of the arbitrary competences and techniques that are required for legitimate participation. It is often objected that an equally shared deliberative politics is simply unrealistic, empirically and socially, at least under contemporary conditions. Whereas deliberation is supposed to make public power cleave to ‘widely shared norms’, ¹³⁷ unequal inputs might also lead to obvious asymmetries in how these norms are defined. This undermines the idea that equality in the exercise of public influence and control may render public power undominating for the individual agent. Pettit suggests that citizens’ system of democratic control must ‘ensure that even unwelcome government intervention does not provide citizens with any evidence of an alien will at work in their lives’. ¹³⁸ It is perhaps unrealistic that public coercion can become something other than ‘alien’ where one has had a hypothetically equal opportunity for sharing in its control, ¹³⁹ regardless of one’s wherewithal, capacity, or predisposition in this respect. This problem seems all the more salient given Pettit’s insistence that ‘equally shared control’ requires ‘equally shared influence’. ¹⁴⁰ He insists that republican ‘control’ merely requires ‘equal access to the system of popular influence’, since ‘some individuals may choose not to play their part in the system’. ¹⁴¹ Again, the disposition and willingness to participate are naturalized somewhat. If some decline to participate in deliberation, Pettit simply attributes this to their disposition and character, implying that any attempt to remedy this would engender the communitarian excess associated with ‘positive liberty’. This overlooks the exclusion latent in political deliberation understood as a social ritual in which arbitrary symbolic codes are set down and (unevenly) ‘learned’. As Olson argues, ‘people of dominant identities are ascribed greater competence than others, and not coincidentally those people are more likely to have political opinions and feel entitled to express them’. ¹⁴² Those unwilling or indisposed to deliberate may lack the requisite habitus or capital necessary to participate, or unwilling to affect the necessary competences and strategies. Bourdieu is concerned that domination in politics stems from the fact that ‘persons lacking the linguistic competences valorized in particular social and institutional domains are de facto excluded from participation in them’. ¹⁴³ The problem is not that these participative competences are unequally shared or distributed, but simply that they may be arbitrary in value. The ‘articulatory style’ which deliberative participants need encompasses factors as mundane as ‘accents, gestures, intonations, and other bodily techniques for speaking’. ¹⁴⁴ Our ‘linguistic-bodily competence’ can constitute a ‘practical barrier to authoritative political speech, even where formal avenues are maintained. Thus the factors that determine legitimate political speech – for example those insinuated in bodily technique – are simply dependent on the peculiar habitus operating in the relevant “linguistic market”.’ ¹⁴⁵

Conclusion

For both Rousseau and Bourdieu the problem with republican deliberation is not that deliberative capacities are simply too variable and uneven to effectuate an equally shared form of control over public power. Their concern is rather with how as an encoded social practice, deliberation befuddles and dominates those agents without access to the valid (but arbitrary) forms of symbolic capital and articulatory know-how. While Pettit concedes that the deliberative process might sometimes fail, he overlooks the possibility that domination might be embedded even in its seemingly innocuous versions. Given his optimistic portrayal of democratic politics generally, Pettit has been criticized for ignoring the problem of ‘bad’ civil society in his vision of contestatory politics. ¹⁴⁶ He might equally be criticized for ignoring ‘bad’ deliberation, bound up with symbolic violence of the sort Bourdieu identifies. I have argued that a similar perspective equally underlies Rousseau’s prescriptions for an apparently radical ‘communitarian’ version of republican politics. The neo-republican alternative rejects such communitarian strategies for deliberative politics, concerned that these will represent a potentially potent form of domination. The assumption – or hope – is that a deliberative republican politics can be achieved without the bracing forms of social cohesion (and integration) historically associated with republican politics. But this under-accounts for the insidious and symbolic violences and thus, the domination harboured within political deliberation itself.