Dialogue and Power: Preliminary Steps to Overcoming an Opposition

The attempt to separately think dialogue and power is doomed to fail, since power is a characteristic feature of interactions between humans. In this article, I try to argue for the need to more deeply consider the role of power in dialogic interactions if we are to get full advantage of the practice of dialogue in the different and complex situations in which it takes currently place. I firstly consider the idea that in order to correctly perform dialogue power should be removed, as it has been suggested among others by William Isaacs and Daniel Yankelovich. Then, I consider the case of deliberative democracy and the objections moved to the “political dialogues” it envisages. Lastly, I give a preliminary hint as to the ways through which the opposition between power and dialogue might be no longer considered as such.