Deliberative Scenes and Democratic Politics in the Lewinsky Case

MARTIN PLOT

Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory

Blackwell

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 1999 vol. 6 p. 167 - 176

1351-0487

As is widely known, democracy is a particularly interesting human invention, a procedural system created to regulate the unavoidable fact of human plurality. This regulation deals then, of course, with a number of different attitudes regarding not only the substantive diversity of positions resultant from this fact of plurality but, sometimes, the system of regulations itself. When this happens, the plurality of perspectives deals not just with particular decisions to be made, but also with its own self-confirmation as a regime, even facing the risk of its own self-transformation into something qualitatively different. As I will show in this paper, the reason the so-called Monica Lewinsky case should be seen as a highly political event is precisely because it happened to become one of those extraordinary moments when a body politic is transversally mobilized and called on to inspect its own rules for public life, in which quite frequently long lasting institutional and cultural changes are introduced—in brief, moments I will here call deliberative scenes. Revista indexada en: Academic Search (EBSCO Publishing) Academic Search Premier (EBSCO Publishing) IBSS: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (ProQuest) Philosopher´s Index (Philosopher´s Information Center) PhilPapers POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials (PDC) ProQuest Central (ProQuest) ProQuest Research Library (ProQuest) Social Services Abstracts (ProQuest) SocINDEX (EBSCO Publishing) Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) Worldwide Political Sciences Abstracts (ProQuest)