Introduction

The current educational policy by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, for both the basic and higher levels, is increasingly focusing on technicism. The agenda and purpose of the educational process in technicism praises knowledge and skills that relegate criticality and citizenship to a minor plan.

The Humanities are gradually being disregarded and ignored to the point of the upsurge of obscurantism as an intentional and systematic devaluation of the sciences. A framework that seems, prima facie, to attack only the Humanities and the Social Sciences with the cooling down of citizen formation for critical participation in society, tends to collapse broader areas, weakening the relationship between democracy and education.

This trend in Bolsonaro’s government shows a certain paradox within the neoliberal model of education. While aiming at training the workforce for the market and simultaneously promoting ultra-conservative practices of rejection of sciences, it also implies the gradual collapse of the critical capacity of citizens. It ends up cooling down school universalization and inclusion, mainly within the scope of public higher education institutions, finally generating social deformation – regarding the conscious and critical participation of civil society in public life.

The concept of ‘multicultural education’ by Amy Gutmann, found in The Oxford handbook of philosophy of education, conceives it as a specific practice of stable and mature democracies that take education seriously. It expresses the opposite of the current obliteration of the critical capacity of citizens and dissemination of abusive practices of violence, intolerance, and exclusion in multiple social segments.

Multicultural education is being thought from the normative assumption of the democratic ideal of civic equality in which “individuals must be treated and treat each other as equal citizens, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity or religion.” (^{GUTMANN, 2009}, p. 409). Gutmann proposes that this practice be taught from an early age so that children have access to an education that teaches them more than technical skills like reading, writing, and counting. Education should also teach about reflecting on the ethical exercise of mutual recognition, respect, and tolerance. In short, a full society is achieved through a broad and inclusive democratic education.

Thinking about education in the line of inclusion and participation requires overcoming the strictly technical and market-oriented administration of educational processes. Educating exclusively for the labor market would blind the potential for solidarity and situational criticism and plunge society into a reaching goals competition game, so that the other would become a mere means to an end, that is, to the imposed market goals. According to Philip Kitcher, in Education, democracy, and capitalism:

[...] in societies with [an] extensive division of labor, as well as stratification by economic classes, there is likely to be a form of myopia in public decisions: citizens are unable to understand the needs and concerns of their peers, nor can they understand their interests. (^{KITCHER, 2009}, p. 303).

The task of education is, according to the author, that of correcting such myopia by expanding the vision of citizens for them to see each other as solidary subjects. We think that Dewey was the forerunner of this view by emphasizing, in 1916, the close relationship between democracy and education. By proposing two fundamental elements for democracy – namely, (i) confidence in the recognition of mutual interests as a factor of social control, and (ii) the continuous readjustment of social habits –, he addressed education with its formative role vis-à-vis the strengthening of plural, dynamic and minimally solidary democratic societies in which their citizens are sensitive to the ethos of public life as the culmination of collective life (cf. ^{DEWEY, 2001}, p. 91).

As in Dewey, Gutmann, and Kitcher, our idea is to present some contributions to the theme of democratic inclusion through the framework of Critical Theory. We use Habermas’ deliberative democracy and Young’s communicative democracy concepts, having as our chief defense the hypothesis that both proposals are complementary and can offer elements for a democratic education based on inclusion and participation particularly of individuals and groups systematically excluded and on the margins of society.

From a methodological viewpoint, our research is guided by a conceptual investigation of theoretical revision. The concepts of deliberation and communication are considered necessary tools for the consolidation of democratic values concerning inclusion and participation. Regarding the concept of deliberation, we will analyze how Habermas sees the deliberative procedural model of democracy as a third way between liberalism and republicanism. Regarding the concept of communicative democracy, we will address how Young expands the concept of deliberation, from an inclusive communication, based on the styles of greeting, rhetoric, and narrative. We will first present the contributions of Habermas and subsequently those of Young.

Our contribution occurs within the limits and scope of a sociological and philosophical scheme that offers tools to think about the relationship between democracy and inclusion from the theorists mentioned. Due to formative-academic reasons, however, we would not have theoretical tools in Education to evaluate in detail and with maximum confidence the inflections of what we propose to this area of expertise. Nevertheless, when writing a sociological and philosophical contribution in a journal of excellence in Education, we are convinced that the expansion of the Habermasian concept of deliberative democracy upon Young’s concept of communicative democracy can offer subsidies and theoretical tools for educators to substantiate democratic and inclusive education proposals.

As a point of initial understanding, both theorists see (neo)liberal models (due to their capitalist and individualistic orientations) tending to focus strictly on the individual’s technical training for the labor market at the expense of training for citizenship, inclusion, and participation in the public sphere. These models tend to weaken the democratic ethos and the education process for the full exercise of citizenship itself; in contrast, they strengthen competition between individuals by creating an atomized and self-interested society.

We will see that both Habermas and Young, starting from the critical theory of society, are against this constraint. Both defend the expansion of the democratic process considering the participation of citizens in political and social life as demands that must overcome the ideas of self-advantage and subservience to the market.

At the national normative level, the Federal Constitution of 1988 and the Law of Directives and Bases of Education provide precisely the formative scope that requires basic and tertiary education not only for the world of work and technical competence but in equal weight for the development as a person and the preparation for citizenship:

[...] education, [a] duty of the family and the State, inspired by the principles of freedom and the ideals of human solidarity, aims at the full development of the student, their preparation for the exercise of citizenship, and their qualification for work. (^{BRASIL, 1996}, Art. 2).

The perspective and approach that we offer in this article start from a working hypothesis according to which Habermas and Young, from the standpoint of philosophical and sociological theory, subsidize a more comprehensive human formation as required in the abovementioned norms. To do this, it is necessary to overcome the limits of incomplete and deficient models of democracy. In Habermas, this overcoming occurs through a deliberative model; in Young, through a model that she calls communicative democracy. Both offer indispensable elements to rethink broader educational processes in which citizenship and training for inclusive participation in society stand out in the face of technicist and individualist restrictions.

For Habermas (2002a), the deliberative model overcomes the deficits of the liberal model. The latter is based on the pursuit of self-advantage and the mere protection of individual rights, without having social issues and participation in the public sphere on its agenda. In such a model, democracy has not yet reached its intersubjective fullness in which individuals must not only be passive recipients of rights but coauthors of laws and decisions concerning civic life. The same is true of the republican model. Paradoxically to the liberal model, it overestimates and hyperinflates the dimension of the community and the articulation between ethics and politics. Republicanism is a fragile model because it presupposes an almost natural adhesion of the individual to collective life.

In Habermas’ view, the deliberative proposal preserves what is good in the previous models. The liberal one maintains the defense of subjective rights that must be inalienable; the republican one preserves the inclination to life in community as an ontological basis of relations. However, he intends to overcome the limits of both insofar as he takes individuals as they are – in their ambiguous and sometimes antagonistic tendency both to individualism and to life in society – and instead of idealizing assumptions, proposes a deliberative, two-channels politics: the deliberative procedure and the democratic formation of the will for participation in the public sphere.

Young acknowledges that the deliberative model has advantages over liberalism and republicanism. She considers, however, that it is still a flawed model, as it reproduces exclusions of individuals, such as women, Blacks, people with little education, low-income, and subordinate groups. Her thesis is that the deliberative model tries to shield itself from the influence and colonization of money and power but is not aware of the exclusion mechanisms inherent in the deliberative procedure itself (YOUNG, 2001, p. 370).

The deliberation based on the strength of the best argument, according to the author, becomes a barrier and arena of conflict (agonistic) that restrain equal participation or the presumed discursive symmetry. Deliberation assumes unity and consensus, either as a starting point or as telos of discursive action instead of giving space for the difference between the subjects. By presenting itself as a set of rules with high rational demands, it underestimates the potential and real participation of individuals who want to express themselves in an emotional and bodily way, whether through narratives, allegories, life experiences, rhetoric, greetings and through other styles that are not limited to the discursive rigor required by the deliberative model.

In the same way as Habermas, ^{Young (1990)} shares the thesis of a de-transcendentalized or reconstructed normativity based on social praxis as the methodological core of critical theory:

[...] as I understand it, critical theory is historical and socially contextualized reflection. Critical theory rejects as an illusion the effort to build a universal normative system isolated from a particular society. (^{YOUNG, 1990}, p. 7).

However, going beyond Habermas, she emphasizes not the discursive practices aimed at consensus but the differences, exclusions, and repressions to individuals and social groups. Young does not evoke ideal types of democracy but is concerned with the concrete experiences by which oppression and exclusion are given. Critical theory, in her perspective, must reconstruct the stories in which the dissatisfaction of groups and individuals rejected from social participation emerges (YOUNG, 2000, p. 10).

As she understands, philosophy and critical theory neglect the oppression occurring to certain social groups, which is precisely what interests her. To this end, she distinguishes two types of policies of difference: a positional type – concerning issues of justice linked to structural inequalities. Such issues are intentionally constructed by the elite’s practices of social exclusion to limit opportunities so that given groups do not achieve welfare; and a cultural type arising from patterns that deny certain groups the freedom of expression and political participation (^{YOUNG, 2007}, p. 82). Her proposal for a communicative democracy is intended to be sensitive to these differences.

Habermas’ procedural model of deliberative democracy

^{Habermas (1997}, p. 9) starts from the premise that “the analysis of the conditions of the genesis and legitimation of the law concentrated on legislative policy, leaving political processes in the background.” The law became indebted to a group of power at the expense of citizen participation in the deliberation of norms. Opposing such a restriction, he proposes that the relationship between legality and legitimacy be made based on argumentative processes with popular participation, reallocating the law in a plan of institutionalized democratic rules. This would guarantee inclusion and participation: “a legitimate creation of the law depends on demanding conditions, derived from the processes and assumptions of communication, in which reason, which establishes and examines, assumes a procedural figure.” (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 9).

The ‘reason’ in question is neither Kantian (of a transcendentalized matrix) nor Hegelian (of metaphysical nature linked to the absolute spirit or even to a theory of ethics in a plan of descriptiveness and reconstruction of social and institutional values). It is a discursive reason, capable of justifying norms, hence, of presenting good reasons and convincing. “In this line, practical reason moves from universal human rights or the concrete ethics of a given community to the rules of discourse and forms of argument.” (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 19).

With the deliberative procedure based on the institutionalization of rules and discursive capacity, Habermas wants, on the one hand, to avoid a normative justification connected to natural rights and, on the other hand, to positive rights. Under the assumption of pluralism, one can no longer appeal to a divine entity or an authority to establish norms. The auctoritas non-veritas facit legem is replaced by the practice of the better argument. In 2013, at Heidelberg’s seminars on Facticity and Validity, held at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign Public Law and People’s Law, Habermas writes the following about overcoming jusnaturalism and juspositivism, based on his proposal for a discursive theory of law and democracy:

The answer of legal positivism is to resort to a fundamental rule arbitrarily adopted or that has become a habit, as a fundamental premise of validity. In contrast, natural law calls for privileged access to knowledge of unconditionally valid laws since they are cosmologically anchored or theologically grounded. [...]; the explanation of natural law is based on metaphysical images of the world that can no longer be universally convinced in pluralist societies. In contrast to this, the theory of discourse attributes a legitimating force to the very procedure of the democratic formation of opinion and will. (^{HABERMAS, 2014}, p. 99).

Law, thought from the discourse theory, presupposes both the procedure and the formation of will and opinion as legitimizing forces of the democratic process so that two basic conditions are satisfied: the symmetrical inclusion of citizens or their representatives and the rewiring of the democratic decision. “The normative source of legitimacy springs, according to this conception, from the combination of the inclusion of all concerned and the deliberative character of forming their opinion and their will.” (^{HABERMAS, 2014}, p. 100). Information, accessibility rules and a guarantee of agents’ participation in political decisions, extinction of coercive practices and violence, and a guarantee of freedom of expression are all indispensable factors that the democratic rule of law must institutionalize for society to participate fully in the deliberations in the public sphere.

When dealing with deliberative politics as a procedural concept of democracy, Habermas initially analyzes the empiricist model, which in his view starts from a nexus between law and power and ends up founding a positivist understanding of normativity (HABERMAS, 1997, p. 11). What counts is the power of those who make the norm, and power means the interest of the strongest (that is, the power of authority). In practice law is used instrumentally to justify arbitrary decisions, dressing up this legal dominance as legitimate dominance. In this way, there is a voluntarist understanding of the validity of the norm in which only what the legislator decrees and establishes in the form of law as an expression of his will is a right.

Such a voluntarist understanding of validity awakens a positivist understanding of law: all that and only what a political legislator, elected according to rules, establishes as a right is a right. In the sense of critical rationalism, however, this translation is not rationally justified, as it is an expression of a decision or of a cultural element that imposed itself factually. (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 14).

In the empiricist model of validation of law, social justice becomes pamphleteering and limited to state propaganda. Citizens are limited to voting to maintain the status quo of authorities that decide the democratic process. This creates a separation between the observer and the participant, between the passive and the active poles. All those who are not part of the law-making power groups are relegated to a lower level.

To subvert this order, for Habermas, it is necessary to overcome an empiricist model of validation of the law and to supplant a democracy based on interests and power. It is necessary to remove the legitimacy of law from legislative policy and reallocate it to citizen participation through procedures and rules that enable the inclusion and coauthorship of rules by individuals and groups from civil society willing to collaborate in the public sphere. The deliberative model is a procedural and normative model that stands as a third way, an alternative between liberalism and republicanism.

The liberal model is marked by the defense of individual rights; the State is seen as a protector of those rights and a political sphere subservient to economic processes based on laissez-faire. In the words of Habermas himself (1997, p. 20):

The nerve of the liberal model does not consist in the democratic self-determination of the people who deliberate, but in the constitutional and democratic normatization of an economic society, which must guarantee an apolitical common good, through the satisfaction of the expectations of happiness of private people in conditions of producing.

In liberalism, there is a strong dominance of the private over the public and the prevalence of the homo oeconomicus (HABERMAS, 2002a, p. 270). Society functions as a market society instead of a political society, so that, according to Hegel, “its determination is placed on the security and protection of property and personal freedom.” (HEGEL, 2010, § 258). The right par excellence is the private right, protecting the individual’s untouchability and property as an inherent part of their subjectivity. Social and political participation rights are placed in a secondary position. ^{Flickinger (2003}, p. 19) writes about the centrality of the property right – which Rousseau considered the source of inequalities:

The private property right intends to protect the owner against possible threats, by third parties, who wanted to prevent his free and spontaneous disposition regarding the use of his property. As a right of defense, property is built on the basis of the exclusion of the other, with the consequence of having to be defended again and again, depending on possible threats.

The freedom present in liberalism is the negative freedom, understood in Hobbesian terms as ‘the absence of external impediments to action’ or as ‘non-intervention’. That is, the individual is free to achieve his life goals, as long as he does not violate the freedom of others.

By freedom, it is understood, according to the meaning of the word, the absence of external impediments, impediments that often take part of the power that each one has to do what he wants, but they cannot prevent him from using the power that remains, according to what your judgment and reason dictate to you. (^{HOBBES, 2003}, p. 112).

This type of freedom – that encloses the individual in themselves and preserves them from social relations – ends up creating what ^{Honneth (2015)} calls social pathologies. The author defines it as the individual’s disconnections and inability to follow and be guided by collective and social norms. “The idea that the freedom of the individual consists in the pursuit of his own interests without impediments ‘from outside’ rests on a deep-seated intuition of modern individualism.” (^{HONNETH, 2015}, p. 46).

In opposition to the individualism of the liberal model, the republican model, which exalts participation in collective life, considers the whole a priority vis-à-vis the individual parts. It refutes the atomism in social relations and is grounded on the articulation between ethics and politics, which is based on the thesis that the meaning of the individual’s life is only full within the community (HABERMAS, 2002a, p. 270). The role of the State in republicanism is not to subsidize the market’s economic successes and individual rights, but to guarantee the success of collective life. Political life is not the result of a contract, but a natural sphere resulting from the solidarity bonds between individuals. Thus, social integration or cohesion is a key category of republicanism.

Within the liberal perspective, the process takes place exclusively in the form of interest commitments. [...]. Whereas the republican interpretation sees the democratic formation of the will taking place in the form of ethical-political self-understanding. [...]. Discourse theory assimilates elements from both sides, integrating them into the concept of an ideal procedure for deliberation and decision-making. (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 19).

The deliberative model proposed by Habermas, unlike the ethos of the modern state, does not divide individuals into citizens of society (bourgeois) focused on self-interest, and citizens of the state (citoyen) inclined to collective life, as diagnosed by ^{Hegel (2010)}. Intending to overcome a dualism between the juridical-liberal paradigm and the social welfare model, the deliberative model articulates both dimensions: “a positive re-coupling between private and public autonomy is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of the proper order of a democratic rule of law.” (^{HABERMAS, 2014}, p. 102).

Thus, Habermasian deliberation has continuities and discontinuities compared to previous models. Liberalism welcomes the defense of individual rights, which cannot be eliminated (to collapse them would cause totalitarianism) but it rejects the excess of individualism and the consequent intersubjective deficit. From the republican model, it draws the intersubjective inclination, however. It does not maintain however its ethical idealism of naturalized assumption of community life, which implies the strictly ethical conduct of political discourses.

Discourse theory does not make the implementation of a deliberative policy dependent on a group of citizens collectively capable of acting but on the institutionalization of the procedures that concern them. (HABERMAS, 2002a, p. 280).

Political deliberation presupposes a conception of autonomy in which the recipients of the law are simultaneously its coauthors so that the democratic praxis must be thought beyond mere demoscopic polls exhausted in the vote.

It is not for us to reduce elections and referendums to the act of voting. These votes reach the institutional weight of the co-legislators’ decisions only in connection with a vital public sphere, that is, with the dynamics of the pros and cons of opinions, arguments, and positions freely floating. (^{HABERMAS, 2014}, p. 98).

Habermas’ position (1997, p. 18), according to which “the process of deliberative politics constitutes the core of the democratic process”, is permeated by the need to institutionalize deliberative procedures and the democratic formation of will and opinion. There is, therefore, a procedural way and a political culture way.

Deliberative politics feeds on the game that involves the democratic formation of the will and the informal formation of opinion. Its development through the pathway of deliberation regulated by processes is not self-sufficient. (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 34).

Deliberation is not limited only to the procedure, because otherwise, it would take the risk of falling into neutrality, as required in a liberal normative model. Such a model is understood as the primacy of the just over the good, in which the principlist dimension would overlap with the ethical dimension. Communitarians counter this neutrality under the argument that principles are not abstract but refer to contexts, worldviews, and values – mostly liberal. They argue that “no presumed neutral principle is really neutral. Any seemingly neutral process reflects, according to them, a certain conception of the good life.” (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 36). Also, Habermas does not restrict deliberation to principles and procedures, because he does not lose sight of the discussion arena in which the different positions of subjects who deliberate about public agendas emerge. Without this, one would be limiting the breadth of public opinion or creating gag rules that would inhibit participation. “And, if we did not put our differences of opinion into question, we would not be able to fully explore the possibilities of an agreement that can be reached discursively.” (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 35).

Another interesting point is that Habermas when accepting ethical-cultural discourses of the good life within the scope of the political presupposes that private and political autonomies are understood as cooriginal spheres. Domestic violence, for example, despite occurring at an intimate and private level, has public resonances and needs to be legislated to counter reprehensible practices.

Talking about something does not mean meddling in someone’s affairs. Without a doubt, the intimate sphere has to be protected from the curiosity and critical eyes of others; however, not everything that is reserved for the decisions of private persons should be removed from public thematization, nor protected from criticism. (^{HABERMAS, 1997}, p. 40).

Regarding this normative cooriginarity between the private and the public presupposed by Habermasian deliberative democracy, it is worth emphasizing that public legality can emanate precisely from the ethical contexts of the struggle for recognition in which subjects claim certain rights from their private experiences (HABERMAS, 1997, p. 41). About the discursive procedure, Habermas (2002b) lists the following criteria:

(a) Advertising and inclusion: no one who, in view of a controversial validity requirement, can bring a relevant contribution, should be excluded; (b) equal communicative rights: everyone is given the same chance to express themselves about things; (c) exclusion of mistakes and illusions: participants must intend what they say; and (d) non-coercion: communication must be free of restrictions that prevent the best argument from surfacing and determine the outcome of the discussion. (HABERMAS, 2002b, p. 67).

These criteria are an ethical reframing of the democratic procedures of Dahl’s political science, which Habermas himself (1997, p. 42) considers interesting for deliberative processes: (a) inclusion of all the people involved; (b) real and equitable chances of participating in the political process; (c) equal voting rights in decisions; (d) equal choice of themes and agendas; (e) articulate understanding of controversial matters and interests. Underlying this is ^{Dahl’s (2012}, p. 306) thesis, according to which “the democratic process is a bet on the possibilities that a people when acting with autonomy will learn to act with justice.”

Finally, Habermasian deliberation through discursive-procedural practical reason requires that the speakers comply with the universalization principle (UP) according to which:

[...] all the norms in force must fulfill the condition that the consequences and side effects, probably resulting from a general fulfillment of those same norms in favor of satisfying the interests of each one, can be accepted voluntarily by all individuals in hand. (^{HABERMAS, 1999}, p. 34).

It also requires compliance with the discourse principle (DP), according to which “all the rules in force would have to be able to obtain the consent of all the individuals in question if they participated in a practical discourse.” (^{HABERMAS, 1999}, p. 34).

Having put these reflections on Habermas’ deliberative democracy model, his attempt to overcome the deficits of the liberal and republican paradigms, we will analyze Young’s criticism of Habermas’s proposal and her attempt to improve deliberation from an alternative model that she called “communicative democracy”.

Iris Marion Young’s proposal for communicative democracy

Young subscribes to overcoming the limits of a democracy based on interests and power through democracy based on the deliberation proposed by Habermas. It is a successful model when compared to the liberal and republican paradigms.

The model of deliberative democracy, on the contrary, conceives democracy as a process that creates an audience, that is, citizens coming together to address collective goals, ideals, actions, and problems. Democratic processes are oriented around the discussion of the public good, rather than competition for the private good of each one. (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 367).

However, she considers that it is still a flawed model as it contains restrictions in its procedure. Its failure occurs in two poles: (i) it limits the democratic discussion to the critical argumentation idealized and loaded with far-fetched and elite cultural demands that can silence or devalue certain people or groups; (ii) it supposes that understanding and consensus are both the initial basis and the final telos of the discussions, which precludes the emergence of pluralism (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 365). Furthermore, this assumption of unity assumed by the deliberative model is contradictory given the pluralism that Habermas himself takes as a starting point for his theory. Another objection is that unity makes the demand for self-transcendence inherent in the communicative process – in which subjects transcend their subjective convictions and perspectives given a public consensus – unnecessary (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 375).

According to Marcelo ^{Neves (2001}, p. 126), this “neo-Enlightenment and consensualist” Habermasian search obliterated dissent and overburdened the multiplicity of the world of life. In addition to the consensual overload of the world-of-life – which is a sphere composed of society, culture, and personality – Habermas also compromises pluriform social praxis of the Lebenswelt³ requiring a specialized systemic language instead of a natural everyday language that is proper of the social praxis.

It is precisely in this double direction that Young intends to review the limits of Habermas’s proposal:

First, I propose that differences in culture, social perspective, or particularistic commitment should be understood as resources to be used in understanding democratic discussion, not as divisions to be rejected. Second, I propose an expanded concept of democratic communication. Salutation, rhetoric, and narration are forms of communication that add to the argument in contributing to political discussion. (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 365).

When trying to expand deliberation to communication, this proposal deserves attention, mainly, in two aspects. It highlights the importance of differences instead of uniformity, so that people’s and groups’ multiple speeches are the keynotes of the communicative process, even if there is no unity of beginning or end; therefore, the focus is not on consensus, but on the plurality of participations that should not be hindered by a method with excluding demands. Furthermore, communicative democracy does not want to supplant the argumentation model, but to add other channels left out by the deliberative proposal, such as rhetoric, narration, greetings – therefore, emotional, non-protocol, spontaneous components in which people and groups in their differences can express themselves.

In claiming this extension of deliberation to communication, Young does not refute but expands Habermas’s proposal towards what is the source of his proposal for discursive ethics: communication. In addition, she seeks to expand what Habermas himself, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, criticized regarding Kantian publicity, namely, its possible restriction of public opinion to a group of scholars (^{HABERMAS, 2003}, p. 110).

Regarding the failures of the deliberative model, Young states that deliberation theorists think that the purge of political and economic power from within decision-making processes would be sufficient to maintain discursive symmetry. However, they do not consider that the procedure and the discursive rules themselves generate exclusions as they presuppose requirements and criteria that do not contemplate the multiple discourses, narratives, and styles. The deliberative model historically stems from institutionalized contexts in Western modernity in which, whether in courts, parliaments or universities, discourse is monopolized by dominant classes and power elites.

Since its Enlightenment principles, [the dominant institutions] have been male-dominated institutions and, in societies differentiated by classes and races, they have been dominated by the white race and the most privileged class. (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 370).

Concretely, the styles privileged in deliberation are masculine and racist styles of discourses in which white supremacy and exclusion of women are evident. The debates assume a crude, monopolizing, inhibiting face, in which subordinate groups are automatically excluded from the presumed symmetry. Deliberation becomes agonistic, conflicting, and competitive, rather than welcoming to differences. This opens an arena in which the strength of the best argument in practice is restricted to certain groups and profiles.

The competition arena in search of the best argument inhibits, frustrates, and silences the participation of women, blacks, indigenes, people, and groups on the margins of the clarification process required by the rigor of the discourse. The deliberative model sets the rules but neglects their internal analysis and neglects a phenomenology of recognition among the subjects of the discourse.

Habermas’ proposal suffers from a sociological deficit, especially when dealing with the material and symbolic reproduction of societies, as it does not sufficiently analyze the relations of power and division of labor, including ignoring the androcentric imposition of labor relations within modern families in that women have the exclusive task of taking care of their children and home, which can imply the silencing of women both at the domestic and public levels (^{FRASER, 1987}, p. 34). Habermas thus pays tribute to his conception, developed in 1967 in Work and Interaction, that work, and the set of material reproduction of life symbolized in it, would have secondary importance in the face of interaction (^{HABERMAS, 2006}).

In addition, the norms of deliberation favor the general, protocol, formal discourse in detriment of particular narratives and narratives moved by emotions, in which the body and feelings break the surface. Sentimental expressions are seen as weakness, as counter-speech, as pseudo-argument. (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 373). This opposition between reason and affectivity, mind, and body, is a resurgence of modern normativity itself, conceived within rationalist and universalist ethics.

In Kantian morality, to verify the correctness of a judgment, the impartial thinker does not need to leave the realm of thought but only seek consistency and the universality of the maxim. If reason knows the moral rules that apply universally to action and choice, there will be no reason for feelings, interests, or inclinations to penetrate the act of making moral judgments. [...]. In modern moral discourse, being impartial means especially being dispassionate: being entirely free of feelings in judgment. (^{YOUNG, 1987}, p. 61-62).

Young’s proposal consists of going against that position. Communicative democracy must expose particularities instead of universalisms, narratives instead of speeches, emotional components instead of abstract reason, bodily expressions instead of protocols and formalism, thus making pluralism and its diverse forms of evidence emerge, so that people and groups previously silenced and obliterated can feel part of the democratic dynamics. For the author, “the differences in social position and perspective of identity function as resources for the public reason and not as divisions that public reason transcends.” (YOUNG, 2001, p. 377). With this, the very concept of “understanding” is altered, which within the deliberative model is conceived as a consensus, and in Young’s communicative model it is conceived as an exchange of experiences and mutual learning.

Finally, the breadth of communicative democracy incorporates, in addition to the discourse, three components not sufficiently aggregated by Habermas in his proposal: greeting, rhetoric, and narrative. Instead of the agonistic nature of deliberative democracy, which is commonly marked by strong and conflicting debate, the greeting lubricates the conversation. Preliminaries like “good morning”, “how are you?”, “see you later” break with the rigor and the coldness of the speech (^{YOUNG, 2001}, p. 380). Non-linguistic gestures such as smiles, handshakes, bodily contact, actions rejected or indifferent to deliberation count for communicative democracy.

Rhetoric expands discourse and breaks with rigor, as persuasion can be done beyond concepts. It can use figurative language, seduction, conquest, humor. Socrates and Plato fought the sophists’ rhetoric and persuasion because they understood that they were nothing more than flattery and adulation, they understood that they did not reach the truth. Both made a dichotomy between emotion and reason and restricted the communicative capacity to the hermetic conceptual discourse, although Plato himself used allegories to express his theories.

The other component highlighted by Young is narration; within it, plurality, particularities, values of a given person or a social group, styles, social and cultural diversity emerge. The narrative is an expression of subjectivity, it is free, without censorship, it is a non-protocol style, it is open to different genders and social classes in which the subjects express their anxieties and expectations.

Final considerations

At first, we saw that Habermas structures his proposal of deliberative democracy based on the criticism of the limits of the liberal and republican models, rejecting the deficits and adding some normative components necessary for the legitimacy of the deliberative politics. In liberalism, he rejects its individualistic limitation based on self-interest. In republicanism, Habermas criticizes the excessive ethical idealism that takes the link between individual action and the political community in a naturalized way. Democracy cannot, for Habermas, be restricted to individual interests, nor dilute individuality in presumed community integration. His deliberative proposal assumes that the spheres of the private and the public are co-original.

As for aggregation, Habermas considers that deliberative democracy cannot give up the legal protection of individual rights presupposed by the liberal model, to the point that its collapse and denial implies totalitarian practices. Concerning republicanism, it welcomes the intersubjective potential in the sense of an opening of the individual to social life. Based on this, he thinks about deliberative democracy from two horizons: the institutionalization of procedures conducive to participation; and the democratic formation of citizens’ will and opinion. Thus, he unites the elements of procedure and political formation as an indispensable basis for deliberation.

We have seen that Young considers Habermas’s proposal – and in general of deliberative philosophers – an advance in relation to fragile democratic models in which self-interest counts. However, the author argues that the deliberative model is still flawed and should be complemented by a model of communicative democracy. The flaw in the model proposed by Habermas lies in the exclusion it generates of subordinate and historically marginalized individuals and social groups from the deliberative processes in racist, sexist, and elitist societies.

Habermas was concerned with shielding the communicative action of colonization and the influence of money and power but did not notice the deficits implicit in the very procedure he proposed. By tying the deliberation procedure into strict rules of participation under neo-illuminist assumptions, he benefited certain groups at the expense of others and transformed the discourse into conflict, into an agonism that silences individuals and collectivities that do not pass through the sieve and assumptions of the rules and discursive molds. Emotions, sensitivity, bodily movements, narratives, rhetoric, greetings were elements exempted from the discursive rigor intended by the rules of deliberation. It is precisely these components dispensed by Habermas that Young reconsidered and strengthened in her proposal of communicative democracy to let groups and individuals formerly obliterated by the rigor and hermeticism of the discourse speak.

In addition, Young considers that Habermas conditioned deliberation to unity and consensus. Contrary to this, the communication model she proposes does not take unity and consensus as a starting and ending point, but plurality so that the fundamental telos consists of highlighting particularities instead of universalisms arising from norms of a given group that dominates the discourse. In this way, women, Blacks, Indigenous people, and low-income people must have a space to communicate their worldviews and demands in their own way, without adhering to exclusive rules and protocols.

From the above, it is possible to infer that the expansion of the Habermasian deliberative model based on Young’s communicative model is successful in rethinking the expansion of educational processes itself beyond a purely technical bias in training for the labor market. It is, therefore, a theoretical instrument that must be read with due attention, as it offers indispensable elements for the reconfiguration of democratic participation in contemporary societies, as it claims the plural participation of diverse groups and social segments, in addition to contemplating the multiple forms of participation that include the rational, emotional, corporal components, beyond a single discursive style of a given social class and a specific gender.

In periods of reflux of democracy, of increasing reinforcement of exclusionary particularities, the proposition of a communicative democracy that is based on the reciprocity of speaking and listening as well as on the inclusion of difference regains all its relevance, especially for education that at the level of Brazil has taken an increasingly technical and economicist predisposition to the detriment of citizenship and the formation of solidary and cooperative individuals, values that are dear to consolidated democracies, from a social point of view.

Therefore, we conclude that Habermas and Young, with their differences and complementarities, follow the tradition that goes back to Dewey on the inseparability between democracy and education. Deliberative democracy and communicative democracy emphasize the need for the formation of the public-democratic will in which individuals must be sensitive to public life and must recognize the aspirations and interests that other individuals have with regard to life in society. Preventing the strengthening of democracy based on values of solidarity, inclusion, respect for differences, and co-participation implies leading it to a purely neoliberal course of free competition, individualism, technicality, and productivism that generates exclusion.