The Real Story of the American Revolution

Deliberation as an Element of Governance

Latest Changes: 06Jan 21 - created / 06Sep17 - The Age of Reason / 06Dec29 - focus on deliberation /

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The Age of Reason (or the Enlightenment) was a period from the 1600s to the late 1700s during which many philosophers proposed that reason was the best way to understand the world. Other alternatives were revelation, incantation, force of arms, and guile. Gutenberg's invention of moveable type facilitated use of the printing press to bring wide distribution (in numbers and location) of accurate copies of long treatises to scholars in many nations. Exchanges of views within this community were somewhat like the list servers (on-line discussion groups) of today, except that the exchanges involved lengthy tracts and long times between one scholar's proposal to the group and another scholar's response. These exchanges were deliberations (based on the Latin word libra, for weighing scales] in which the reasons advanced to support a proposal were weighed (in one's mind) against the reasons advanced in rebuttal to that proposal. This process requires that the two parties resist the urge to settle the matter by force and instead patiently exchange and respectfully consider each others' proposals and reasons. Ideally this process leads to a situation where both sides agree that the reasons supporting one proposal are sufficiently strong ("weighty") that both parties can agree that this proposal is the best solution to a problem or is the best way to understand or explain what we have observed. The deliberative approach tries to avoid a win-lose ending, in which one side is overwhelmed, but unconvinced that the other side is correct, and says, "I quit. You win." Instead it tries to achieve a win-win ending, in which both sides can say, "Aha! Now that we have mutually examined the situation more fully we can agree that proposal B has more convincing support than proposal A." [The discussion above is based on an editorial by John Churchill in The Key Reporter for Fall, 2006, p 2]

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