Justification, application, and consensus: Notes on democracy and deliberation

This article aims to reconstruct the issue of legitimation of democratic or ders based on a typology of deliberative consensuses, relating different in itial positions by actors to the principles of justification and applicatio n of the norms by which they operate. Based on Habermas' model of the ethic s of discourse, the article argues that a democratic order's legitimacy dep ends on a "virtuous circle of democracy", defined as the circulation of for ms of consensus that are able to avoid the characteristic crises in legitim ation for each type of consensus.