Habermas

Rescuing the Public Sphere

Pauline Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415543743
• eBook ISBN: 9781134209262
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

If we are to believe what many sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a near terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the general significance of needs and problems seems to be collapsing. These cultural potentials appear endangered by a newly aggressive attempt to universalize and extend the norms of the market. For four decades Habermas has been trying to bring the claims of a modern public sphere before us. His vast oeuvre has investigated its historical, sociological and theoretical preconditions, has explored its relevance and meaning as well as diagnosing its on-going crises. In the contemporary climate, a systematic look at Habermas' lifelong project of rescuing the modern public sphere seems an urgent task.

This study reconstructs major developments in Habermas' thinking about the public sphere, and is a contribution to the current vigorous debate over its plight. It marshals the significance of Habermas' lifetime of work on this topic to illuminate what is at stake in a contemporary interest in rescuing an embattled modern public sphere.

Habermas' project of rescuing the neglected potentials of Enlightenment legacies has been deeply controversial. For many, it is too lacking in radical commitments to warrant its claim to a contemporary place within a critical theory tradition. Against this developing consensus, Pauline Johnson describes Habermas' project as one that is still informed by utopian energies, even though his own construction of emancipatory hopes itself proves to be too narrow and one-sided.

1 Introduction

The plight of the public sphere

If we are to believe what sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a near terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the general significance of needs and problems appears to be under threat. Peter Self is worried that the ‘public’ is becoming something of a dirty word.¹ Zygmunt Bauman also has his sights set on defending the modern agora from systematic attacks. Michael Walzer thinks that a vital public culture is absent in contemporary multicultural America,² while Alain Touraine has repeatedly warned us about an accelerated crisis in public life.³ What is this public sphere whose reputed imminent collapse is provoking such anxious concern?

John Dewey's concise definition suggests a starting point. ‘The public’, he tells us, ‘consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for’.⁴ Here the public is described as a particular, purpose-built, solidarity. It refers to a mode of interaction in which mutually dependent private individuals seek to build enabling interpretations of their shared circumstances and call for a general response to collectively significant needs and dissatisfactions. The modern public is not a collectivity drawn from organic, traditional solidarities. Rather, it designates a political process in which common cause is built through the search for solutions to problems initially encountered as private concerns. Dewey uses the term to refer to a concretely encountered mode of integration between private individuals endeavouring to respond politically to the socially induced character of their needs and their problems.

The modern public sphere suggests an evolved, democratized, interpretation of a modern humanist commitment to the production of self-directed, consciously shaped, futures. Conditioned by the historical appearance of demands for political rights of equal and atomized individuals in a mass society, it is a mode of interaction guided by a learnt conviction that in principle equal, but in fact relatively powerless, individuals can give concrete shape to the hope for an autonomous, self-determining life as a shared project. The public sphere refers, then, to processes of rational consensus-formation whose normativity is tied to a democratic interpretation of the aspiration towards self-shaped futures in an egalitarian and pluralistic age.

The public sphere suggests a mode of association that is distinguished by the particularity of its purposes. Whereas private forms of association endeavour to cement their exclusive character, an interest in building the shared grounds in terms of which the needs and points of view of strangers can become mutually intelligible is central to the goals of a public. Robert Putnam uses the terms ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ to describe the distinct purposes of private and public types of sociality.⁵ A bonding mode of association tends to be inward looking and has exclusive intentions. Examples include ‘ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women's reading groups, and fashionable country clubs’.⁶ ‘Bridging’, by contrast, describes the inclusive, outward looking purposes of a public that seeks to ‘encompass people across diverse social cleavages’. The civil rights movement suggests a clear example.⁷

A practical interest in facilitating the efforts of mutually dependent private individuals to achieve self-determination is fundamental to the motivations of the modern public. This central purpose suggests a mode of interaction that is governed by the expectation that each will be allowed to try to demonstrate the reasonableness of his needs and of his points of view. A public mode of association must offer participating individuals the opportunity to establish the sense in which their concerns, needs and problems can be recognized as having generalizeable significances that are deemed amendable to active intervention by the collective. Participation in the public sphere is open to all those who engage in a process of mutual deliberation about what counts as equal and common in their perspectives, experiences, needs, and problems. This determination draws upon and builds recognition that concerns that have society-wide dimensions and significances require a general, political response.

Richard Sennett is clear that we need to make some distinctions about the purposes that structure different kinds of modern solidarities.⁸ He is convinced that public life is under attack, but for him, this process is quite consistent with the bolstering of certain types of associational ties. In a recent study he looks at the shape of working lives in new capitalist societies and emerges with an interpretation of the social and political significance of different types of contemporary solidarities. Central to life in the new capitalism is the radical insecurity of a transient working population that can count on nothing in a ‘flexible’ working environment where constant risk-taking is rewarded and loyalties to professions and institutions ask for disappointment. This is an environment that endorses a particular type of association characterized by the temporary and superficial bonds of the ‘work team’. Carefully engineered to suit the demands of the day, this is a form of solidarity that creates no new entity with its own capacity to initiate action. It simply facilitates the effective activities of its individual participants. The work ethic of the team ‘celebrates sensitivity to others; it requires such “soft skills” as being a good listener and being cooperative; most of all, teamwork emphasizes team adaptability to circumstances’.⁹

The brainchild of new capitalism, the work team cannot satisfy the longings of insecure and isolated individuals living amongst the heightened risks of what Bauman has described as ‘liquid modernity’. Sennett claims that the ‘uncertainties of flexibility; the absence of deeply rooted trust and commitment; the superficiality of teamwork; most of all, the spectre of failing to make something of oneself in the world, to “get a life” through one's work’ are the conditions for a newly intense longing for community.¹⁰ This is a desire for a solidarity whose primary aim is that of self-protection. It is a defensive ‘we’, tolerated within the framework of new capitalism, that bases itself on the contrived homogeneity of a group constituted through its opposition to others: to immigrant groups, indigenous peoples, asylum seekers and the like.

The superficial solidarities of the work team and the contrived bonds of a defensively constructed ‘we’ do have some common features. In both cases the concept of solidarity prohibits an integral role to a spirited individuality aware of its dependence on others and keen to participate in building shared interpretations of problems and values. Solidarities formed by the efforts of private individuals seeking to achieve recognition for the generalized significance of their problems and of their particular points of view are, for Sennett, the basis upon which the ‘dangerous pronoun’ takes shape.¹¹ What is unsettling about this ‘we’ is that it suggests a public of private citizens who do not accept the limits of imposed or conventional descriptions of their needs, their circumstances, and their futures. Shared descriptions are rather built through the search for recognition engaged in by mutually dependent private individuals. Sennett insists that the give and take of argumentation and debate is an essential tool in building the democratic solidarities of a public. It is through argument, discourse, and debate that individuals are able to create the mutual understandings that permit recognition of the reasonableness of their viewpoints and the legitimacy of their claims upon shared resources. He stresses that agreements forged through argument and debate are inevitably stronger and more enduring than ties shaped by mere convention or convenience.¹²

The discriminations Sennett brings to an account of contemporary solidarities feature in other major attempts to identify the distinctiveness of the modern public sphere. Bauman, for example, is also interested in the fate of the peculiar mode of interaction in which private individuals seek to build collective interpretations of the significance of their problems and needs. According to him, the modern agora is a context ‘where people meet daily to continue their joint efforts of translating back and forth between languages of private concerns and public good’.¹³ For both Sennett and Bauman, what appears to be at stake are the procedures through which private concerns can offer themselves as specific interpretations of wider descriptions of the public good and hence as having legitimate claims upon shared resources. Walzer supports this general account of the distinctiveness of the modern public sphere. He makes the point that in contemporary multicultural America the associational life of collective private interests is actually quite strong.¹⁴ An evolving multiculturalism has seen newly confident ethnic and cultural groupings voicing their distinctive needs and identity claims. What remain undeveloped, though, are the cultural expectations and democratic institutional arrangements that allow these localized problem–descriptions to explore and to test out their wider significance and to justify the legitimacy of their claims upon shared resources. A living, institutionally embedded, public culture needs to be secured in contemporary multicultural America.¹⁵

Anthony Giddens claims that the revival of social democracy is central to the political vision of the ‘Third Way’.¹⁶ He insists that the fostering of an active civil society is essential to a new politics that seeks an alternative to an Old Left that is ‘dismissive of worries about civic decline’¹⁷ and to the economic rationalist agendas of conservative governments. Theorists of Third-Way politics embrace a particular construction of the principle of civic activism as a social good. For Mark Latham, the new politics turns to the collective as a support to private initiatives committed to the self-managing of problems. According to him, the Third Way is a policy framework designed to ‘support the work of social entrepreneurs: innovative projects that create new social and economic partnerships in disadvantaged neighbourhoods’.¹⁸ Norman Birnbaum criticizes this aspect of Third Way politics. According to him, the Third Way wants the production of social bonds to appear as the moral responsibility of governments.¹⁹ Government is to merely foster the self-managing of problems whose presumed local character remains uninterrogated. The specificity of the public as a mode of interaction that explores the systemic, generalized significance of specific needs and concerns is thereby missed.

Walzer makes the point that the apparently closed and tight bonds of particular local associations can provide the support and focus through which isolated individuals practice attitudes of civic engagement and learn to recognize the interdependence of their needs with claims raised by others. He goes on to suggest that, as long as they do not remain tied to a defensive construction of a supposedly homogeneous ‘we’, the solidarities of particular bonds can help sustain the complex double-sided motivations that nourish a vital democratic way of life. On the one hand, these bonds can promote the necessary confidence and self-consciousness of a particular point of view that is then able to take its self-interpretations into wider forums in which it can seek to describe their reasonableness and justice. At the same time, these local bonds can serve to reproduce and to extend the recognition of the mutually dependent character of private individuality that is also essential in building a modern public.

This constitution of a collective brought together by the mutual recognition of private individuals of their shared needs and by their search for generalized solutions contrasts with the description of inter-connectedness that binds the contemporary teams of the new capitalist workplace. These are collectives organized around the pragmatic effectiveness of pooling the resources of private actors who are left in no doubt that their concerns, problems, and futures are finally their own singular responsibility. The self-awareness of mutual dependence that is, for Dewey and others, essential to the formation of a modern public does not enter into a zero sum game with a commitment to the ideal of the unique, unrepeatable personality. Again, the peculiarity of the mode of interaction that forms the public sphere is decisive. The hermeneutic effort that is required to make the generalized significance of his needs and aspirations understood by strangers faces each participant in discourse with the task of expanding his own self-understanding. Each party in the interchange needs to reflect on the shared value commitments that can make its points of view and claims intelligible to the other.

The distinctive interactive and consensus-building processes of the modern public sphere give shape to how its ‘architecture’ (the relations of informal civil associations and formal decision-making centres) is seen to be ideally structured.²⁰ Because it neglects the need and problem-interpreting role of the public sphere, Third Way politics tends to describe one-sidedly the relations between initiating political centres and local associations that are called upon to self-manage already described concerns using their own resources. Dewey's account of the public as a dialogically produced interpretation of the political dimensions and ramifications of problems conceives the architecture of the public sphere differently. With the later Habermas and others, he advocates a decentred model.²¹ This is a framework that recognizes the role of local associations, of specific publics, in hammering out descriptions of the shared character of particular unmet needs and dissatisfactions. It is also a model that recognizes the vital and specific contribution of the formal institutions of a political centre to the functioning of the public sphere. This account of the dialectics of issue-interpreting and problem-solving functions performed by a layered public sphere holds that the political centre ideally offers itself as a receptacle to, and as a testing ground for, descriptions of the generalized significance of need descriptions that are brought to it. This formal public must, Dewey and Habermas insist, constantly endeavour to justify the expectations of legitimate decision-making that the informal publics invest in it.

Perhaps we can get a clearer sense of what is at stake in the feared loss of a public sphere by turning to Alexis de Tocqueville's penetrating observations about the significant differences between types of modern artificial solidarities. As an aristocratic stranger visiting the evolving democracy of nineteenth-century America, Tocqueville was struck by the egalitarian and individualist interpretation of human freedom that was taking shape in the New World. This principle of privatism could, he noted, promote a longing for an exclusive type of solidarity. Tocqueville warned that the desire to protect narrowly conceived private interests could see the new society structured around the contestation between defensive coteries. He feared that this way of reacting to the vulnerability and powerlessness of independent private individuals might see the return of the use of associations as ‘weapons’ designed to secure advantage that had characterized a hierarchical aristocratic world.²² Tocqueville insisted that a modern universalizing construction of liberty need not be encountered as the task of autonomous, isolated, and impotent individuals. Human freedom can be interpreted through a double allegiance to individuality and to egalitarianism as a mode of interaction in which self-directed private individuals seek to collectively build ways of life that reflect their considered priorities and agendas. For Tocqueville, a modern public draws upon egalitarian and individualistic commitments to produce a distinctive form of solidarity in which ‘[n]o one abjures the exercise of his reason and free will, but everyone exerts that reason and will to promote a common understanding’.²³

Tocqueville saw that the prospects for egalitarian liberty would depend on whether modern populations could grasp the opportunities for forging types of interaction in which a liberal insistence on private right could cease to function as a dogmatic principle of self-assertion. Instead, individual needs and identity claims could seek to elaborate interpretations of their shared significances to build common cause. Considered in this light, it seems that the public sphere inhabits an ideological terrain responsive to main hopes and problems opened up by classical liberalism while representing a learnt reworking of these commitments. Specifically, the modern public sphere upholds a mode of interaction that seeks mediation between the liberal principle of private right and the republican ideal of a common good. This, Tocqueville hoped, would be a new kind of sociality in which practices of dialogue and debate allowed insights into apparently settled descriptions of particular aspirations and convictions, thereby loosening the burden of imposed traditional frameworks. It would also be a new kind of negotiated inter-subjectivity that would encourage the increased capacity for self-reflection embraced by the open and expanded personalities of the modern world.

Tocqueville's great fear was that the opportunity to build such participatory solidarities would be missed. He was deeply troubled by the prospect that self-absorbed and atomized individuals would enter into only calculating and instrumentalizing relations with each other. Relinquishing an active interest in securing the chosen character of their entwined futures, modern individuals might well...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Habermas
• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: the plight of the public sphere
• 2 The structural transformation of the public sphere
• 3 The theory of communicative action
• 4 Discourse ethics and the normative justification of tolerance
• 5 A discourse theory of law and democracy
• 6 Globalizing the public sphere
• 7 The utopian energies of a radical reformist
• 8 Romantic and Enlightenment legacies: the postmodern critics
• 9 Distorted communications: Habermas and feminism
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index