Page 125 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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Unfi nished Projects:
Refl exive Democracy

In the course of this discussion, and particularly in the previous chapter,

it has become clear that, to a significant degree, the Habermasian
idea of the public sphere hangs on the question of refl exivity. The
concept of the public sphere becomes most productive when it is

considered within the context of a culture of reflexivity. It is this

culture of reflexivity that energises the public sphere, problematising
once unquestioned values and institutions and leading to demands
for new ways of managing contradiction, conflict and difference.

And in the Habermasian model, the public sphere and its refl exive
context must be mutually reinforcing: the public sphere takes on
the role of a kind of exemplary space for the considered, deliberative
and, as far as possible, egalitarian weighing of competing claims,
an ethic that can at least rub off on – though by no means colonise
– the more unruly and visceral micro-practices and discourses of
everyday life. We have also seen how this culture of refl exivity is
not simplistically inscribed in historically unfolding competencies,
though this implication may be gleaned from an isolated reading of
Habermas’s mid-career writings: in The Theory of Communicative Action
and related works, Habermas places perhaps excessive store by the
emergence of ‘post-conventional’ capacities which render modern
human agents better placed than their pre-modern counterparts to
historicise, that is, to contextualise and criticise their own historical
situations and individual biographies. In his early work on the
public sphere, Habermas more successfully highlighted the historical
contingencies of specific institutions and modern ‘traditions’
(including concrete constitutional and journalistic cultures) which
must form the backdrop to any analysis of cultural refl exivity. In his
more recent work, Habermas places greater store by another layer of
‘contingency’: the rise of an ethical orientation that self-consciously
affi rms a reflexive attitude towards our subjective, intersubjective and

institutional structures in the context of communicative relations
judged according to standards of openness and reciprocity. But
throughout these modulations in Habermas’s broader philosophy

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