Page 127 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

122 Jürgen Habermas

suggesting that Habermas ultimately offers a persuasive argument for
the ongoing relevance of certain values which, at their most abstract,
have been coterminous with the Enlightenment project itself.
The ‘new’ politics of refl exive modernity, then, bubble up to the
surface in the context of opaque and shifting power relations which
increasingly escape the grasp of liberal democracy’s offi cial polity.
The welfare state once promised to empower its citizens through
a range of de facto rights. It promised to protect them against the
extremities of an untamed market and it promised to redistribute
the fruits of economic growth according to principles of justice.
Now, acute scepticism (or cynicism) towards these ideals informs
the contemporary Zeitgeist. Radical ‘Leftist’ politics have lost their
way. The goal of full employment has long been in its death throes.
Ambitious national and even regional protectionist policies have been
unimpressive in the face of global capital’s immense mobility and
power of veto. The inequalities between rich and poor have widened
to scandalous proportions both internationally and within national
societies. Fiscal crisis is routinely acknowledged as an endemic feature
of the welfare state. The old Keynesian model of economic growth
and full employment certainly offers no answers of its own to the
ecological damage that it unleashed and which has since accelerated,
unchecked, under the auspices of both neo-liberal and ‘Third Way’
2
social-democracy experiments. And the politicisation of the private
sphere has seemingly turned out to equal something other than the
democratisation of everyday life: this is highlighted by the apparently
contradictory phenomena of periodic popular backlashes against a
‘nanny state’ which is perceived as a remote and unwelcome force
seeking to micro-manage aspects of everyday life such as child rearing,
employment practices and school curricula, and, on the other hand,
ongoing campaigns required to address domestic violence, children’s
rights, income disparities between genders and so forth. In sum, these
depressing realities may be largely responsible for a political vacuum
on the Left; but they are also stimulating new ways of conceiving
progressive politics.

REFLEXIVE AGENCY

As we have seen, one way to begin mapping the new modes of

struggle and conflict within this context is to consider the different
‘fault-lines’ along which they seem to be emerging. But what, briefl y,
of the ‘old’ fault-lines of the ‘old’ politics? It is important to recognise

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Goode 02 chap04 122 23/8/05 09:36:13