Losing Democracy. Dewey's Concept of an Experience and the Question of Legitimacy

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between the democratic experience and the legitimacy of an institutional context. In this exploration, John Dewey’s concept of the aesthetic experience plays a key role. The main thesis is the possibility to conceive of citizens’ recognition of democratic legitimacy as Dewey envisages the feeling of consummation completing the aesthetic experience. This approach gains plausibility when we link Dewey’s concept of the aesthetic experience to his concept of experimental democracy, that is, democracy as a cooperative problem-solving practice in which actors try out provisional solutions by means of social communication