Page 126 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 121

of history, the question of reflexivity has been central to his entire

intellectual project.
Habermas has summarised the general orientation of his work

in terms of the ‘unfinished project of modernity’. In drawing our
discussion to a close, I want to suggest that we consider the unfi nished
project to be, instead, one of ‘reflexive modernity’. This is not my

neologism, of course: I want to stage an encounter here between
the Habermasian politics of the public sphere and the discourse of

reflexive modernity that has, under the auspices of Ulrich Beck and
Anthony Giddens in particular, cast its influence over the sociological

imaginary during the past decade or so. In doing so, I am holding true
to the tactic that I outlined in the introduction: by staging encounters
with thinkers whose disputes with Habermas could be described as
internal (though by no means trivial), I hope to arrive at a close
reading and rich sense of the merits and pitfalls of the Habermasian
project. This is a tactic that can complement, rather than trump, the
more common one of analysing the great theory wars separating
Habermas from his philosophical arch-rivals.

Beck has argued that ‘reflexive modernity’ demands the ‘reinvention
1
of politics’. I suggest that this impulse is broadly in keeping with the
Habermasian project, despite the conservatism we may be tempted
to read into Habermas’s recent focus on constitutional patriotism
(Chapter 3). Or, to put it another way, I suggest that the Habermasian
narrative of the public sphere teaches us that, whether we like it or
not (and, indeed, whether Habermas himself likes it or not), the
very meanings that we attach to the words ‘politics’, ‘citizenship’
and ‘democracy’ are (and must be) up for grabs even as we seek to
defend them. What’s called for is a process of continual reinvention
and renewal. We cannot rely on God, Nature or Reason to run to our
rescue and take this task off our hands or, rather, in our pluralistic
times, we cannot allow any one specific version of God, Nature or

Reason to prevail at the expense of another. But because we cannot
‘reinvent’ ex nihilo, then our own particular gods (and demons), our
own reasons, and our own versions of ‘nature’ (both human and non-
human) – our lifeworlds in all their diversity – provide simultaneously
the raw material of and the greatest challenge to the new politics. It’s
important to emphasise that, if the term ‘reinvention’ is appropriate
at all, it cannot signify anything like a clean break with the past.

Indeed, the shifting political sands identified in the discourse of

reflexive modernity can be traced back at least as far as the emergence
of late capitalism itself. What’s more, I shall want to conclude by

23/8/05 09:36:12
Goode 02 chap04 121
Goode 02 chap04 121 23/8/05 09:36:12