Most contemporary deliberative democrats contend that deliberation is the group activity
that transforms individual preferences and behavior into mutual understanding, agreement
and collective action. A critical mass of these deliberative theorists also claims that John
Dewey’s writings contain a nascent theory of deliberative democracy. Unfortunately, very
few of them have noted the similarities between Dewey and Robert Goodin’s theories of deliberation,
as well as the surprising contrast between their modeling of deliberation as a
mixed monological-dialogical process and the prevalent view expressed in the deliberative
democracy literature, viz., that deliberation is predominantly a dialogical process. Both
Dewey and Goodin have advanced theories of deliberation which emphasize the value of
internal, monological or individual deliberative procedures, though not to the exclusion of
external, dialogical and group deliberation. In this paper I argue that deliberative theorists
bent on appropriating Dewey’s theory of moral deliberation for political purposes should
first consider Goodin’s account of ‘deliberation within’ as a satisfactory if not superior
proxy, an account of deliberation which has the identical virtues of Dewey’s theory—
imaginative rehearsal, weighing of alternatives and role-taking—with the addition of one
more, namely, that it operates specifically within the domain of the political.
