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The paper discusses whether deliberative democracy should make us see democracy as deliberation only insofar as we need to see it as such, or whether it should make us see democracy as deliberation essentially. Critics have argued that deliberative democracy does the latter rather than the former. But they have not sufficiently shown how this works, why exactly it is problematic, and how the associated problems may be overcome. Drawing on recent literature on Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of being held captive by a picture, I develop a conceptual framework for understanding these questions. Drawing on recent empirical work on the realities of deliberative democracy, I show why empirical accounts of democracy demand that we learn to see democracy under many different aspects – of which deliberation is an important, but not necessarily the essential one.
