The Origins of the Deliberative Turn

Abstract This chapter deals with the origins and the building-process of the theoretical field of deliberative democracy (which took place over a very specific period between 1980 and 1993). This history was far from linear: Deliberative Democracy came out of a complex process in which different conceptual elements were gradually elaborated, changed and reworked. The theoretical field was built through several independent approaches. We can pinpoint five different stages: a phase of transition and theoretical innovation compared to the models of participatory democracy that characterized the sixties and seventies; the first formulations and insights, in the early eighties; the constituent phase proper in the late eighties; the phase of articulation of a deliberative field and its overlapping with other intellectual traditions; and finally the consolidation of the philosophical foundations of deliberative democracy, mainly thanks to Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls, with their works of the early nineties.