Page 131 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

126 Jürgen Habermas

other words, experts are decentred and multiplied, but in no sense is
the expert system transcended or downgraded in importance. Rather,
in this ascendant culture of reflexivity, when expert claims enter

the universe of lay discourse, they must increasingly compete with
other expert claims and engage with the reflexive capacities of lay

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agents themselves.
The world in which we live is, apparently, one of increased scepticism,

knowledgeability and reflexivity. Giddens’ new politics seeks new
ways of engaging with, rather than unrealistically eliminating or
withdrawing from, the opportunities and risks of modernity. Social
actors (both citizens and institutions) are condemned to make choices
whose consequences cannot be predicted with absolute certainty, not
least because inaction or withdrawal carries (often intolerable) risks
of its own (consider, for example, the dilemmas that vaccination
programmes pose for parents, or the social disabilities that follow
from a decision to avoid the considerable dangers of car travel).
Whether we opt for the swings or the roundabouts, the new refl exive
modernity offers us neither the certitude of ‘providential reason’
once promised by the Enlightenment, nor the nostalgic path back
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to Mother Nature implicated in many ecological discourses.
Giddens’ model of refl exive agency may be a useful one. Despite
its rather pragmatic, anti-utopianism (Giddens argues that we must
abandon ‘emancipatory politics’ in favour of ‘life politics’), it is, on
one level, a rather sanguine reading of late modernity. But there is
also a missing dimension that I think actually renders it a rather

bleak narrative. His portrait of reflexive modernity is ultimately rather
solipsistic. He depicts a world of individuals who deploy their refl exive
capacities to negotiate their relations with others and with expert
systems. But the intersubjective dimension – the question of how we
deal with each other as subjects – is largely absent. Granted, Giddens
argues that we need more dialogue between individuals and between
citizens and institutions. But there is nothing that raises dialogue
above its default status as a conduit along which the mute ‘data’
of information, insight, views and experiences can fl ow. Dialogue
functions rather like a bridge on which we can agree to meet in
compromise before scurrying back to our own lifeworlds: the real

reflexive action takes place on the terra firma of the ‘clever’ individual.
We get little insight into the intractable problems of discussing how
‘we’ might want to live together in moral communities and how
‘we’, under whichever voluntary or ascriptive markers of collective
identity (as a group, as a ‘society’, as a species, perhaps), might try to

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