Jurgen Habermas III - Reflections and Conjectures (p.1-21)

#ethics

Class: PHIL-282
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Book: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, edited by Ciaran Cronin.

Notes:

Text

Reflections and Conjectures on a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

As the author of the book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, originally published in German nearly six decades ago and chosen by Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani as the starting point for their edited collection of papers, I would like to make two remarks. Judging by sales, the book, although it was my first, has remained my most successful to date. The second remark concerns the reason that I suspect accounts for this unusual reception: the book contains a social and conceptual history of the 'public sphere' that attracted a great deal of criticism but also provided new stimuli for more wide-ranging historical research. This historical aspect is not my topic here. But for the social sciences, it had the effect of embedding the political concept of the 'public sphere' in a wider socio-structural context. Until then, the term had been used in a rather unspecific sense, primarily within the conceptual field of 'public opinion' understood since Lazarsfeld in demoscopie terms; by contrast, my study conceptualized the public sphere in sociological terms and assigned it a place within the functionally differentiated structure of modern societies between civil society and the political system. This meant that it could also be studied with a view to its functional contribution to social integration and, in particular, to the political integration of the citizens. I am aware that the social significance of the public sphere extends far beyond its contribution to democratic will formation in constitutional states; nevertheless, I also discussed it subsequently from the perspective of political theory. In the present text, too, I take as my starting point the function of the public sphere in ensuring the continued existence of the democratic political community.

I will begin by addressing the relationship between normative and empirical theory (1), before going on to explain why and how we should understand the democratic process, once it is institutionalized under social conditions marked by individualism and pluralism, in the light of deliberative politics (2), and concluding these preliminary theoretical reflections by recalling the improbable conditions that must be fulfilled if a crisis-prone capitalist democracy is to remain stable (3). Within this theoretical framework, for which Structural Transformation provided a preliminary social-historical analysis, I will outline how digitalization is transforming the structure of the media and the impact that this transformation is having on the political process. The technological advance marked by digitalized communication initially fosters trends towards the dissolution of boundaries, but also towards the fragmentation of the public sphere. The platform character of the new media is creating, alongside the editorial public sphere, a space of communication in which readers, listeners and viewers can spontaneously assume the role of authors (4). The reach of the new media is shown by the findings of a longitudinal survey on the usage of the expanded media offerings in Germany. While internet usage has increased rapidly over the past two decades and both television and radio have been largely able to hold their ground, consumption of printed newspapers and magazines has plummeted (5). The rise of the new media is taking place in the shadow of the commercial exploitation of the currently virtually unregulated internet communication. On the one hand, this is threatening to undermine the economic basis of the traditional newspaper publishers and of journalists as the responsible occupational group; on the other hand, a mode of semi-public, fragmented and self-enclosed communication seems to be spreading among exclusive users of social media that is distorting their perception of the political public sphere as such. If this a conjecture is correct, an important subjective prerequisite for a more or less deliberative mode of opinion and will formation is jeopardized among an increasing portion of the citizenry (6).

(1) In studies dealing with the role of the political public sphere in constitutional democracies, we generally distinguish between empirical investigations and normative theories - John Rawls speaks in this connection of ideal theory. This alternative involves an oversimplification. In my view, the role of democratic theory is to reconstruct the rational content of the norms and practices that have acquired positive validity since the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century and, as such, have become part of historical reality. The very fact that empirical studies of processes of opinion formation under democratic conditions become pointless if these studies are not also interpreted in the light of the normative requirements these processes are supposed to satisfy in constitutional democracies, highlights an interesting circumstance. However, understanding this calls for a brief historical digression. For the revolutionary acts that endowed basic rights with positive validity first made citizens aware of a new normative gradient [normatives Gefälle] that as a result became part of social reality itself.

The peculiarly demanding normativity of constitutional orders founded on basic rights is a function of their 'unsaturated' character, in virtue of which they point beyond the status quo. This historical fact can be better understood against the backdrop of the customary form of social normativity. Social phenomena, be they actions, flows of communication or artefacts, values or norms, habits or institutions, contracts or organizations, have a rule-governed character. This is shown by the possibility of deviant behaviour: rules can be followed or broken. Different kinds of rules exist: logical, mathematical and grammatical rules, game rules and instrumental and social rules of action, which can be differentiated according to strategic and normatively regulated interactions. It is the latter norms, in particular, that are distinguished by the peculiar mode of validity of the 'ought'. As the nature of the sanctions for deviant behaviour shows, such normative behavioural expectations may make more or less strict demands, with morality imposing the most stringent demands. The distinguishing feature of the universalistic moral conceptions that arose with the worldviews of the axial age is that they call for the equal treatment of all persons in principle. In the course of the European Enlightenment, this moral-cognitive potential became detached from the respective religious or metaphysical background and was differentiated in such a way that - according to the still authoritative Kantian tenor - each person, in his or her inalienable individuality, ought to be accorded equal respect and receive equal treatment. On this conception, each person's conduct must be judged, taking his or her individual situation into consideration, in accordance with precisely those general norms that are equally good for everyone from the discursively examined standpoint of all those possibly affected.

A particular sociological implication of this development is especially interesting in the present context. We must recall the singularly radical character of rational morality if we want to gauge the steep normative gradient of the oughtness claim [Fallhöhe des Sollensanspruchs] raised by this egalitarian-individualistic universalism. Moreover, switching perspective from rational morality to the rational law inspired by this morality, this radicalness is also essential for understanding the historical significance of the fact that, since the first two constitutional revolutions, this exacting moral-cognitive potential has formed the core of the basic rights sanctioned by the state, and thus of positive law in general. With the 'declaration' of the basic rights and human rights, the substance of rational morality migrated into the medium of binding constitutional law constructed out of subjective rights! With those historically unprecedented founding acts that give rise to democratic constitutional orders in the late eighteenth century, the hitherto unknown tension of a normative gradient lodged itself in the political consciousness of legally free and equal citizens. This encouragement to develop a new normative self-understanding went hand in hand with a new historical consciousness turned offensively towards the future, as Reinhard Koselleck has demonstrated. Taken as a whole, it amounted to a complex shift in consciousness embedded in the capitalist dynamics of a transformation of conditions of social life that is simultaneously accelerated by technological progress. In the meantime, however, this dynamic has provoked a more defensive mindset in Western societies, one which feels overwhelmed rather than energized by the technologically and economically propelled growth in societal complexity. But the enduring social movements that repeatedly reawaken the consciousness of the incomplete inclusion of oppressed, marginalized, degraded, afflicted, exploited and disadvantaged groups, classes, subcultures, genders, races, nations and continents, are a reminder of the gap between the positive validity and the still unsaturated content of the human rights that, in the meantime, have been
'declared' not only at the national level? Hence - and this is the point of my digression - among the preconditions of the survival of a democratic polity is that the citizens should see themselves from the participant perspective as being involved in the process of progressively realizing the basic rights, which, although they have not been exhausted, already enjoy positive validity.

Quite apart from these long-term processes through which the basic rights are realized, what interests me is the normal case in which the status of free and equal citizens in a democratically constituted polity is associated with certain taken-for-granted idealizations. For when the citizens participate in their civic practices, they cannot avoid making the intuitive (and counterfactual) assumption that the civil rights they practise generally deliver on what they promise. Especially with a view to the stability of the political system, the normative core of the democratic constitution must be anchored in civic consciousness, that is, in the citizens' own implicit beliefs.

It is not the philosophers, but the large majority of the citizens, who must be intuitively convinced of the constitutional principles. On the other hand, they must also have confidence that their votes count equally in democratic elections, that legislation and jurisdiction, the actions of government and the administration, are mostly above board, and that, as a general rule, there is a fair opportunity to revise dubious decisions. Even though these expectations are idealizations that the actual practice sometimes falls short of to a greater or lesser extent, they create social facts insofar as they are reflected in the citizens judgements and conduct. What is problematic about such practices is not the idealizing assumptions they demand of their participants, but the credibility of the institutions, which must not openly and enduringly repudiate these idealizations. Trump's fatal exhortation would hardly have met with the intended furious response of the citizens who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 if the political elites had not for decades disappointed the legitimate, constitutionally guaranteed expectations of a significant portion of their citizens. Hence, the design of a political theory tailored to this kind of constitutional state must be such that it does justice both to the peculiar idealizing surplus of a morally based system of basic rights - a surplus that imbues the citizens with a consciousness of being involved in the exercise of democratically legitimized government - as well as to the social and institutional conditions which lend credibility to the idealizations that the citizens necessarily associate with their practices.

A theory of democracy, therefore, does not need to undertake the task of designing, i.e. constructing and justifying, the principles of a just political order on its own in order to instil them in the citizens like a teacher; in other words, it does not have to understand itself as a normatively designed theory. Its task is instead to rationally reconstruct such principles from existing law and from the corresponding intuitive expectations and conceptions of legitimacy of the citizens. It must render the fundamental meaning of the historically established and proven, and hence sufficiently stable, constitutional orders explicit and explain the justifying reasons that can invest the de facto exercise of government with actual legitimizing power in the eyes of their citizens, and therefore also ensure civic participation.

That political theory, by making explicit the implicit consciousness of the mass of the citizens who participate in political life, can in turn shape their normative self-understanding is no more unusual than the role of academic history of the present, which performatively influences the further course of the historical events it describes. This does not mean that political theory plays an inherently pedagogical role vis-à-vis politics. Therefore, I do not see deliberative politics as a far-fetched ideal against which sordid reality must be measured, but as an existential precondition in pluralistic societies of any democracy worthy of the name. The more heterogeneous a society's conditions of life, cultural forms of life and individual lifestyles are, the more the lack of an a fortiori existing background consensus must be counterbalanced by the commonality of public opinion and will formation.

Because the origins of the classical theories predate the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, they could present themselves as normative blueprints for establishing democratic constitutions. However, a contemporary political theory can simply take note of the fact that the exacting democratic constitutional idea introduces a tension between the positive validity of binding constitutional norms and the constitutional reality into the very reality of modern societies and that, when extreme dissonances become apparent, this tension can still trigger the mobilizing dynamic of mass protests. Hence, such a theory must recognize that its task is reconstructive in nature. Both the republican and the liberal theoretical traditions, however, already distort this idea by one-sidedly according priority either to popular sovereignty or to the rule of law, and thereby miss the point that individually exercised subjective freedoms and intersubjectively exercised popular sovereignty are equally original. For the idea underlying those two constitutional revolutions is the foundation of a self-determined association of free consociates under law: the latter, as democratic co-legislators, must ultimately grant themselves their freedom through the equal distribution of subjective rights in accordance with general laws. According to this idea of collective self-determination, which combines the egalitarian universalism of equal rights for all with the individualism of each subject, democracy and the rule of law are on a par. And only a discourse theory that revolves around the idea of deliberative politics can do justice to this idea. (10).

(2) The approach of deliberative politics can be traced back to the early liberal world of ideas of the Vormärz period. In the meantime, however, it has unfolded in the context of the welfare state, its chief merit being that it explains how, in pluralistic societies that lack a shared religion or worldview, political compromises can be reached against the background of an intuitive constitutional consensus. The secularization of state power gave rise to a gap in legitimation. Because the belief that the ruling dynasties were divinely ordained no longer sufficed to legitimize them in modern societies, the democratic system had to legitimize itself out of its own resources, as it were, through the legitimacy-generating power of the legally institutionalized procedure of democratic will formation. Religious conceptions of legitimacy were not replaced by a different idea, but instead by the procedure of democratic self-empowerment, which is institutionalized in the form of equally distributed subjective rights, so that it can be exercised by free and equal citizens. At first glance, it seems quite mysterious how the legal institutionalization of a procedure of democratic will formation - in other words, sheer legality' - could nevertheless give rise to the legitimacy' of universally convincing results. Essential to explaining this is the analysis of the meaning that this procedure acquires from the perspective of the participants. It owes its persuasiveness to an improbable combination of two conditions: on the one hand, the procedure calls for the inclusion of all those affected by possible decisions as equal participants in the political decision-making process; on the other hand, it makes the democratic decisions in which all individuals are involved together dependent on the more or less pronounced discursive character of the preceding deliberations. As a result, the inclusive formation of will becomes contingent on the force of the reasons mobilized during the preceding process of opinion formation. Inclusion corresponds to the democratic requirement that all those affected should have equal rights to participate in political will formation, while the filter of deliberation takes into account the expectation that solutions to problems should be cognitively correct and viable, and grounds the assumption that the results are rationally acceptable. This assumption can be justified, in turn, by the falsifiable supposition that, in the consultations leading up to a majority decision, all relevant topics, requisite information and suitable proposals for solutions are discussed as far as possible with arguments pro and contra. And it is this requirement of free deliberation that 12 explains the central role of the political public sphere. Incidentally, this abstract consideration is confirmed by the historical fact that something like a bourgeois public sphere' emerged at the same time as liberal democracy, first in England and then in the United States, France and other European countries.

However, those two requirements of the democratic process - namely, deliberation and the inclusion of all citizens - can be realized even approximately only at the level of the institutions of the state, and above all in the representative bodies of parliamentary lawmaking. This explains the essential but limited contribution that political communication in the public sphere can make to the democratic process. Its contribution is essential because it represents the sole locus where public opinion and political will are formed in a manner that in principle includes in corpore all adult citizens who are eligible to vote. And this can, in turn, motivate the decisions that citizens make together, but as individuals and in the isolation of the voting booth - that is, 'of their own free will. These electoral decisions lead to an outcome binding on all citizens insofar as they determine the party political composition of parliament and, directly or indirectly, of the government. At the same time, the contribution of the political public sphere to democratic opinion and will formation is limited because, as a general rule, no collectively binding individual decisions are taken there (only in rare cases do fundamental questions have such a clear structure that they can be decided by such plebiscites). The formation of opinion steered by the mass media gives rise to a plurality of public opinions among the dispersed public of citizens. These public opinions, which are compiled out of topics, contributions and information, and thus acquire a distinctive profile, compete over the relevant issues, the correct policy goals and the best problem-solving strategies.

One circumstance is especially relevant in our context: the overall influence that the will of the citizens, hence of the sovereign, acquires over the decisions of the political system depends essentially on the enlightening quality of the contribution of the mass media to this formation of opinion. This is because opinion formation is sustained by the prior processing by the professional media of the topics and contributions, alternative proposals, information and supporting and opposing positions - in short, of the input fed into the public sphere via the information channels of, among others, the political parties, the interest groups and PR agencies, and the societal subsystems, as well as by civil society organizations and intellectuals. This more or less informed pluralism of opinion filtered by the media system gives every citizen the opportunity to form his or her own opinion and to make an election decision that is rationally motivated from his or her point of view. However, the competition of opinions and decisions within the public sphere itself remains open; here deliberation is still separate from the decisions of the individual voters, because the elections to parliament are only prepared in the public sphere. It is only beyond the threshold of general elections that the elected members of parliament can consult and decide with each other in accordance with democratic procedures. Only in the representative bodies and the other state institutions, and in an especially formal way in the courts, are procedural rules tailored to the deliberative format of opinion and will formation that justifies the presumption that majority decisions are more or less rationally acceptable.

In order to correctly assess the limited contribution that the political public sphere can make, we must examine the organizational section of the constitutional text and the structural division of labour within the political system as a whole and read it like a flow chart. It then becomes apparent how the democratic current of the citizens' opinion and will formation branches out beyond the threshold of elections and is directed into the channels - besieged by the lobbying of the functional systems - of party politics, legislation, jurisdiction, administration and government.
It ultimately flows into the decisions stemming - within the framework of the law - from compromises between functional imperatives, political and social interests and voter preferences. The legitimate political results are then evaluated and criticized in turn in the political public sphere and are processed into new voter preferences after the conclusion of legislative terms. The assumption that political discourses are also oriented to the goal of reaching an agreement is often misunderstood. It by no means implies an idealistic conception of the democratic process as something like a convivial university seminar. On the contrary, one can assume that the orientation of reasonable participants to the truth or correctness of their argued convictions adds even more fuel to the fire of political disputes and lends them a fundamentally agonal character. To argue is to contradict. It is only the right - and, indeed, the encouragement - to say 'no' to each other that elicits the epistemic potential of conflicting opinions in discourse; for the latter is geared to the self-correction of participants who, without mutual criticism, could not learn from one another. The point of deliberative politics is, after all, that it enables us to improve our beliefs in political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems. In the cacophony of conflicting opinions unleashed in the public sphere only one thing is presupposed - the consensus on the shared constitutional principles that legitimizes all other disputes. Against this consensual backdrop, the whole democratic process consists of a tide of dissent that is stirred up over and over again by the citizens search for rationally acceptable decisions oriented to the truth.

The deliberative character of the opinion and will formation of the voters is measured in the political public sphere by the discursive quality of the contributions, not by the goal of a consensus, which is in any case unattainable; rather, here the participants' orientation to the truth is supposed to ignite an open-ended conflict of opinions that gives rise to competing public opinions. This dynamic of enduring dissent in the public sphere likewise shapes the competition between parties and the antagonism between government and opposition, as well as differences of opinion among experts. The arguments mobilized in this way can then inform the binding decisions to be taken in a procedurally correct manner in the corresponding fora of the political system. All that is required to institutionalize the anarchic power of saying 'no' unleashed in public debates and election campaigns, in disputes between political parties, in the negotiations of parliament and its committees, and in the deliberations of the government and the courts, is the prior political integration of all participants into the consensus over the basic intention of their constitution. The latter is simple enough: it merely spells out the plain will of the citizens to obey only the laws they have given themselves. Without such a consensus on the meaning of deliberative democratic self-legislation, the respective minorities would not have any reason to submit to majoritarian decisions, for the time being at least. In making this point, however, we must not lose sight of the main factor on which the fate of a democracy depends: judged from this normative standpoint, the institutionalized formation of political will must also actually function on the whole in such a way that the voters' constitutional consensus is confirmed by experience from time to time. In other words, there must be a recognizable connection between the results of government action and the input of the voters' decisions, such that the citizens can recognize it as the confirmation of the rationalizing power of their own democratic opinion and will formation.13 The citizens must be able to perceive their conflict of opinions as both consequential and as a dispute over the better reasons.

But this is at odds with reality', one might object, even now in the oldest Anglo-Saxon democracies. The approval that the storming of the Capitol met with among Trump voters must probably also be understood as the emotive response of voters who for decades have lacked a sense that their neglected interests are taken seriously by the political system in concrete, discernible ways. The dynamic of political regression into which almost all Western democracies have been drawn since the turn of the millennium can be measured by the decline, and in some countries virtually the demise, of this rationalizing power of public debates. This dependence of the problem-solving power of a democracy on the flow of deliberative politics highlights the central role of the political public sphere. Without a suitable context, however, the essential preconditions of deliberative politics for the democratic legitimization of government cannot gain traction among a population from which, after all, 'all authority' is supposed to be 'derived 15.

Government action, landmark decisions of the higher courts, parliamentary legislation, competition between political parties and free political elections call for an active citizenry, because the political public sphere is rooted in a civil society which - as the sounding board for the disruptions of major functional systems in need of repair - establishes the communicative connections between politics and its social 'environments'. However, civil society can only serve as a kind of early-warning system for policymakers if it brings forth the actors who organize public attention for the relevant issues that are preoccupying citizens. In the large territorial societies of the modern Western democracies, however, there has always been a tension between the functionally required level of civic commitment and the private and personal obligations and interests that public citizens [Staatsbürger] both want to and need to fulfil in their role as private citizens [Gesellschaftsbürger]. This structural conflict between the public and private roles of citizens is also reflected in the public sphere itself. In Europe, the bourgeois public sphere in its literary and its political form was only gradually able to free itself from the shadow of older formations - above all the religious public sphere of ecclesiastical government and the representative public sphere of the personal rule embodied in emperors, kings and princes - once the social-structural prerequisites for a functional separation of state and society, of the public from the private economic sphere, had been satisfied.
Viewed from the perspective of the lifeworld of those involved, therefore, the civil society of politically active citizens is inherently situated in this field of tension between the private and public spheres. As we shall see, the digitalization of public communication is blurring the perception of this boundary between the private and public spheres of life, although the social-structural prerequisites for this distinction, which also has far-reaching implications for the legal system, have not changed.
From the perspective of the semi-private, semi-public spaces of communication in which users of social media are active today, the inclusive character of the public sphere, which was hitherto clearly separate from the private sphere, is disappearing. This constitutes, as I would now like to show, a disturbing development on the subjective side of media users that at the same time draws attention to the inadequacy of the political regulation of those new media.

Summary & Notes

I. Defining the Theoretical Task

II. Deliberative Politics: The Procedural Core

III. Function and Limits of the Political Public Sphere

IV. The Structural Transformation of the Digital Age

Conceptual Insight: Habermas's emphasis on the democratic procedure, rather than immediate consensus, shows that politics is not a search for absolute philosophical truth, but a high-stakes, ongoing argument. The orientation toward truth (the Sollensanspruch) is the mechanism that forces accountability and rational critique, even though disagreement remains the norm.