Learning Public Deliberation through the Critique of Institutional Argument.

In a society, institutions are frequently charged with the responsibility of representing the public good. Relying on argumentation, institutions interpret public interest in order to define, articulate and support the norms that sustain collective life. Often, this process benefits those who inhabit the public domain. Institutions enact their value when they coordinate social, economic and political interactions that better everyone's quality of life. At other times, however, institutional arguments about the public good reduce the terms of social and political development to a functional equation that robs individuals of the ability to articulate visions of collective interest. Using "stability" to trump criticism, institutions outflank those who seek to question or revise the form and content of public good. This essay investigates how institutions argue about the idea of public good. Institutional arguments about public interest shape the deliberative interactions that constitute public opinion. Discussions of particular policy choices often affirm the general authority of institutional practices of reasoning and codify norms of public interest. This study engages arguments lodged in the courts, the field of economics, and those charged with developing environmental protection policy. Investigating the problem of how these practitioners place a value on shared environmental resources, the essay illustrates both how institutions argue about the idea of public interest and how these arguments structure the possibilities of deliberative pluralism. Concerned that the tasks of public life are increasingly the rote chores of institutions, the essay develops critique in order to open up arguments that claim to work on behalf of the public. By exposing how decision makers justify public policy, the essay argues that institutions can create paradoxical claims about the value of public deliberation in order to short-circuit political debate. Such arguments enact discursive double binds that co-opt the ability of "citizens" to recognize their interests. I maintain that this process is one in which institutions sustain their power by using the form of public deliberation in order to empty its content. The study of argumentation and debate can easily overlook how institutions argue about the ends of public life. Theory often brackets how institutions forge the norms of public policy by either reducing institutional actions to monologic technique or integrating their announcement into the pragmatic study of how to achieve desired policy outcomes. Abstracting its own contingency, criticism thus forgets the basic relation between instrumental technique and human interest (Habermas, Knowledge 314). In response, this essay examines how argumentation occurs when methods of expressing, comparing and evaluating the public good differ among various democratic for a for argument. Today, there is great uncertainty about the composition and value of public goods. Developing out of the demands of political identity formation and economic complexity, a public good is perhaps best described as a relation that underpins human substance and motivation (Burke 337). Variously theorized in rhetoric, philosophy, economics and law, a public good is the enactment of reasoning processes dedicated to negotiating the relationship between private and collective modes of existence.(2) Accordingly, a public good is a space and time in which to express interest. In public, private experience is the possibility of representation, shared reference, and power (Arendt, Human 57). As ontology, public good is the necessity of expression to the end of self-definition with others. However, a public good is also a reification of experience. As symbolic constitutions of interest, public goods are necessarily exclusive and incomplete. The politics of the public good is universal only as ideology. Given its complex and often violent legacy, there are important reasons to be suspicious of actions justified on the grounds of public good. …