Jurgen Habermas

Critic in the Public Sphere

Robert C. Holub

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134921096
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The most important intellectual in the Federal Republic of Germany for the past three decades, Habermas has been a seminal contributor to fields ranging from sociology and political science to philosophy and cultural studies. Although he has stood at the centre of concern in his native land, he has been less readily accepted outside Germany, particularly in the humanities. His theoretical work postulates the centrality of communication and understanding, and as such his strategy of debate is marked by a politically informed unity of theory and practice. Holub's book is the first detailed account of the major debates in which Habermas has engaged since the early sixties. It stems from the conviction that his critics have not understood the political strategy behind his various interventions, or the consistency that informs his intellectual activities. Habermas is viewed in dialogue with important philosophical, sociological and political currents in West Germany. Holub demonstrates how Habermas pursues a course that incorporates various aspects of his opponents' positions, while simultaneously defending perceived threats to democracy and open discussion.

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Introduction: intervention in the public sphere

This book is concerned chiefly with the debates in which Jürgen Habermas has engaged. For the vast majority of contemporary intellectuals a study of scholarly or political controversies would result in a limited monograph concerning one aspect or area of an entire oeuvre. The main features of Habermas’s thought, however, can be developed fairly comprehensively by attention to his various interventions in academic and public disputes. The frequency and significance of debate during his intellectual career are remarkable when compared with other postwar thinkers. Why has Habermas over the past three and a half decades been so eager to enter into controversy? Why has he sought to challenge so many people in various disciplines, from philosophy and sociology to history and political science, in such a variety of forums, from academic conferences and seminars to speeches at mass demonstrations and newspaper articles? One answer to these question is surely that Habermas has advanced his own theory in a ‘dialectical’ fashion in the older sense of that word, namely, through pointing out and overcoming arguments that he finds in his opponents’ thought. Often Habermas rejects an adversarial position, but simultaneously incorporates significant dimensions of that same position into his own theoretical outlook. On one level Habermas obviously enters debates in order to learn and expand his own horizons through the complex process of absorption, adaptation, critique and self-reflection.

There are two additional reasons why debate has played such a seminal role in Habermas’s intellectual vita. The first has to do with the political goals implicit in his work. In almost all instances Habermas has intervened in an ongoing controversy or initiated a conflict when he perceived an ideological threat to his own project or to the democratic principles that his theory supports. This dimension of his debating practice is sometimes overt, but frequently political aspects are derivative from more abstract theoretical positions. Portions of the following chapters are devoted to clarifying what exactly was at stake politically for Habermas and how his critique on a theoretical level has implications for the realm of social praxis. Perhaps the most important reason why debate has been such an integral part of Habermas’s way of being has to do with a consistency he has maintained between his philosophical positions and the putting into practice of these positions in his various talks and writings. Unlike the theorists he would later group under the rubric ‘critics of reason’, Habermas’s project is in harmony with his own philosophical presuppositions. He presents a theory of argument and controversy by means of argument and controversy. The ‘performative consistency’ that Habermas exhibits throughout his writings enhances the political appeal of his theoretical position. Ranging over a spectrum of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, Habermas does not have to proceed marginally, poetically or textually in guerrilla attacks against a putatively repressive establishment, but rather assaults frontally the central issues in contemporary theory and in modern society.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE

It is no coincidence that the first topic Habermas tackled after his dissertation was the place of public debate. Nor is it atypical of his writings that Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), which recently appeared in English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989),¹ was one of the most influential books for the incipient oppositional movement at German universities and one of the most hotly debated works of the 1960s. Like almost everything that Habermas has written since that time, it elicited numerous, sometimes persuasive, often lively responses among contemporary readers. Several books appeared as direct replies to this work, and scores of essays augmented, corrected, or rejected his account of the public sphere. Almost no one ignored it, however, and scarcely a social scientist or humanist in Germany was unfamiliar with its central premises. When compared to his later work, however, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is slightly unusual in Habermas’s œuvre. No other work by Habermas is as accessible as this one. While most of his more theoretical endeavors include heavy doses of philosophical abstraction and specialized vocabulary drawn from a variety of fields, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere employs a less technical sociological jargon and includes much illustrative material. In this monograph the theoretical discourse is often interrupted by talk of coffee houses, newspaper circulation or literary salons. Although it employs an interdisciplinary approach and has interdisciplinary implications, it fits the paradigm for a sociological study more readily than the works Habermas has subsequently written.

Despite its slightly anomalous character in Habermas’s writings, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere articulates concerns that are foundational for his general perspective and that have continued to be important for Habermas even in his most recent work. Indeed, as recently as June 1989 he published an essay in which he sketched a normative concept of the public sphere.² What attracted Habermas to the notion of a public sphere then and now is its potential as a foundation for a critique of society based on democractic principles. The public sphere is a realm in which individuals gather to participate in open discussions. Potentially everyone has access to it; no one enters into discourse in the public sphere with an advantage over another. These generic qualities of the public sphere are of course subject to particularization based both on historical context and on the topics that are admitted for discussion. The bourgeois public sphere in its classical form, which is the central focus for The Structural Transformation, originates in the private realm; it is constituted by private citizens who deliberate on issues of public conern. The literary public sphere, which Habermas considers a prefiguration of a political public sphere oriented towards matters of state policy, deals with issues of cultural, rather than governmental concern. As an institution mediating between private interests and public power, the public sphere in its bourgeois form and political variant is based on a fundamental ideological obfuscation: the fictional identity of the property owner (bourgeois) and the human being pure and simple (homme). Yet in all of its manifestations the principles of equality and accessibility are indispensable ingredients. In contrast to institutions that are controlled from without or determined by power relations, the public sphere promises democratic control and participation.

Habermas’s sociological examination of the rise of the public sphere (mainly in English society) is supplemented with an account of the public sphere in the tradition of political philosophy. Most important for him in this regard is German idealism, one of the chief sources for his early theory and the focus of his earlier dissertation on Friedrich Schelling. In central chapters Habermas examines previous theorizing on matters pertaining to the public sphere in the works of Immanuel Kant and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. The former places the public sphere at the very center of his enlightenment project. Like most thinkers of the eighteenth century, Kant conceived of public debate as the business of philosophers, not of common people. But his conception of philosophy, unlike ours today, was that it is not an exclusively academic affair without practical consequences for the lives of all citizens. Debate on a variety of issues had to be submitted to the public, conceived of course as a ‘reasoning public’, for decisions. His claim is that ‘the public use of one’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment.’³ Kant considered the rise of secret societies such as the Freemasons to be the result of the restriction of public debate; and he even went so far as to consider it a natural vocation of mankind to communicate with his fellow men, especially in matters affecting mankind as a whole. He did not, of course, admit the propertyless or those who are not their own master to the citizenry of the state. And like many in the age of Enlightenment, he felt that civil society would transform itself naturally and without force into an entity capable of guaranteeing a just functioning of the state. In other words he shares the optimistic enlightenment view which maintains that private vices become public virtues, that the bourgeois of the private realm becomes the citoyen whose discourse takes place from the perspective of the homme, from the perspective of humanity as a whole.

This view was exploded by the French Revolution as well as by subsequent historical conflicts between the classes. In Habermas’s view the most incisive theorist for this new stage of development was Hegel. Severing civil society from science, Hegel contends that subjective views and opinions have nothing to do with science. As Habermas summarized his thought on this issue: ‘The public opinion of the private people assembled to form a public no longer retained a basis of unity and truth; it degenerated to the level of a subjective opinion of the many.’⁴ So on the one hand, Hegel’s writings signal the dissolution of the liberal model in which a private sphere is complemented by a public sphere. The opinions of the multitude are degraded to common knowledge, and like common knowledge in the Phenomenology of the Spirit, there is no necessary relationship between what the multitude thinks and what is true. Enlightenment and publicity are thus radically separated in Hegel’s system. On the other hand, Hegel sees through the liberal ideology that trusted in civil society as a natural state of affairs and accepted uncritically the equation of bourgeois and homme. He thus sets the stage for Marx’s further reflections on the problem by cutting through the delusions of enlightenment thought.

Marx starts by analyzing further the notion of civil society. In contrast to his predecessors, he finds that it should not be conceived as a unity, but rather as a contradictory entity composed of classes that are necessarily antagonistic to one another. Public opinion as it is manifested in the bourgeois public sphere therefore amounts to false consciousness. Like Hegel, Marx presupposes a radical separation of civil society from science; but unlike his idealist predecessor, he sees the public sphere as an arena of conflict. The notion of general accessibility and unconstrained dialogue is an obfuscation by and of bourgeois ideology, since it stands in contradiction to the empirical reality of the public sphere in capitalist societies. The question Marx leaves us with is the following: is the public sphere able to hold to its own premises without dissolving civil society? One key difference between Marx and Habermas is the way in which each answers this question. Marx cannot envision a public sphere that realizes the ideal conditions imputed to it by bourgeois ideology within bourgeois society. The satisfaction of the demands for true accessibility and total lack of constraint can only be achieved through the socialization of the means of production and thus the destruction of the category of bourgeois (and proletariat). This situation can only come about, Marx contends, through a violent revolution that removes all class antagonism. Habermas, although he never deals with the question directly, suggests that something like a public sphere can be realized without recourse to the violent overthrow of the existing social order. This does not mean that significant and drastic changes are unnecessary for unconstrained public debate to occur. But in general, Habermas places greater faith in those potentially democratic forms that have developed in bourgeois society.

None the less, the public sphere, at least its bourgeois prototype, began to decline during the course of the past century, and Habermas devotes the final third of his book to a discussion of its demise. The collapse occurs because of the intervention of the state into private affairs and the penetration of society into the state. Since the rise of the public sphere depended on a dear separation between the private realm and public power, their mutual interpenetration inevitably destroys it. The role that the public sphere had played in the intellectual life of society is then assumed by other institutions that reproduce the image of a public sphere in distorted guise. Parliament, for example, has its ideological origins in the same bourgeois ideology that promoted a public sphere, but its development gradually belies its ideal form. As we progress into the twentieth century, the free exchange of ideas among equals becomes transformed into less democratic communicative forms, for example public relations. Party politics and the manipulation of the mass media lead to what Habermas calls a’refeudalization’ of the public sphere, where representation and appearances outweigh rational debate. He analyzes this and kindred symptoms of modern society in some detail, although his basis for analysis appears more restricted than in his earlier discussion of the rise and constitution of the public sphere. Too often Habermas’s remarks on modern society are too strongly tied to the postwar situation in the Federal Republic, which, because of its status as a European, a vanquished and a formerly Fascist nation, may be atypical of modern societies. The inclusion of the United States or a country like Japan might have forced Habermas to rethink some of his conclusions, particularly as they relate to family structure and the welfare state.

This narrowing of scope is one of the chief weaknesses of the volume. But the work also evidences other problems of a more theoretical nature. Chief among these is the oscillation between normative concepts and historical accounts. At times it appears that Habermas wants to merge history and theory in the notion of the bourgeois public sphere. This appearance is fostered by the fact that the text is structured as a rise and fall, and it is reinforced by the talk of a ‘refeudalization’ of the public sphere in the final chapters. If the bourgeois variant does serve as the norm for the public sphere, then Habermas has opened a methodological conundrum. Marxist analysis of concepts, to which Habermas would subscribe at this stage of his development, has more often followed the remarks Marx himself made in the Introduction to the Grundrisse (1857–8).⁵ Here Marx states that only the most fully developed form enables us to understand the history of a concept. The bourgeois norm for the public sphere, however, does not occur in fully developed bourgeois society, but rather in its early liberal phase; some critics have even suggested that if such a sphere existed at all it should be located in the incipient phases of bourgeois society when it began to assert itself against feudalism. No matter where we locate the public sphere historically, it seems certain that the bourgeois ideal must possess normative value for all notions of the public sphere. Habermas conceives of the bourgois public sphere as an ideological anticipatory form that, like ideology itself, ‘transcends the status quo in Utopian fashion’.⁶ If he did not, the construct would forfeit all political relevance, and this work would amount to an antiquarian investigation of an obsolete institution.

At the basis of this vacillation between normative and historical description is a conceptual tension that originates in Habermas’s indebtedness to two different traditions of political thought. To a large degree Habermas adheres to the critique of twentieth-century society developed by his predecessors in the Frankfurt School. Enunciated in its most drastic and pessimistic form in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) [Dialectic of Enlightenment], this critique suggests that mass culture and instrumental rationality have captured the political stage to such a degree that no leverage point exists for effective oppositional activity. The single qualification of this bleak picture, found in Adorno’s valorization of certain types of esoteric art, provides scant hope for any genuine political change either. Habermas shares in this vision when he discusses the bureaucratization of society, the role of the mass media in manipulating or curtailing public discussion and the bourgeois system of political parties.

Yet frequent remarks demonstrate that he does not partake completely in the general pessimism of Adorno and Horkheimer, that he appreciates more than they did the positive aspects of the political thought of the Enlightenment. He recognizes that it is impossible to return to the liberal public sphere as it once existed—if in fact it ever existed—but he is unwilling to relinquish the conceptual underpinnings he has associated with it. This difference in attitude stems largely from Habermas’s more differentiated analysis of the modern world. German Fascism and the American culture industry often appear equally pernicious in the writings of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Habermas’s more favourable, although hardly uncritical, views on the Western heritage cause him to find a ray of hope even in the stifling political climate of contemporary parliamentary democracies.

UNIVERSAL PRAGMATICS AND COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

This ray of hope becomes, so to speak, the sunbeam shining on communicative action in Habermas’s later theory. Rational discourse that is free from both domination and linguistic pathology, and oriented towards intersubjective understanding and consensus is precisely the type of activity appropriate to the public sphere. Departing from a theory about the societal location for democratic discourse, Habermas proceeded in the next two decades to ground a critical theory of society in language itself. He chose this route, however, only after his initial foundational attempts had failed. The document of this fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor’s foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: intervention in the public sphere
• 2. Methodology in the social sciences: the positivist debate
• 3. On ideology and interpretation: the debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer
• 4. Democracy and the student movement: the debate with the left
• 5. Systems and society: the debate with Niklas Luhmann
• 6. Modernity and postmodernity: the debate with Jean-François Lyotard
• 7. National Socialism and the Holocaust: the debate with the historians
• Notes
• Index