Page 135 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

130 Jürgen Habermas

not only from incalculability and the inability to isolate facts. It also
stems from the fact that the veil of autonomy has been lifted from
the production of natural and social scientific knowledge. This is not

simply because of the political and commercial interests that fund
and shape it (something we might wishfully conceive as a distortion
that could be ironed out), but also because science is always already

implicated in political struggles to define and symbolically construct
‘nature’ and its trajectories.
So whilst the moral, ethical and aesthetic questions which are
thrown up by genetic engineering or urban planning, say, take on
increased urgency, we lack democratic institutions that can facilitate
debate across the disciplines, that is, across Weber’s value spheres, as

well as between citizens and specific institutions. The media perform
this intermediary function with varying degrees of credibility, but
the idea that such a function should be the exclusive preserve of
professional media institutions is deeply problematic. The media obey

specific logics governed by both convention and structural constraint,
and, in the main, are exempt from any formal responsibility to ensure
fair, open and representative discourse (beyond a set of minimal
negative prohibitions). And they lack any formal power (or ‘right’) to
have their deliberations taken account of in upper levels of political
representation. The media are not formally governed by the principles
of either justice or sovereignty, and this underscores both their
democratic importance and their democratic impotence.
Reflexive modernity, in Beck’s account, demands an enhanced

‘separation of powers’ and a diversification of both formal and

informal institutions of debate driven by the challenges of de-

differentiation. Expert systems, including scientific institutions, are

unavoidably reflexive insofar as they must increasingly address the
consequences of their actions – they become source, defi ner and
remedy simultaneously. It’s clear, for example, that economic growth
is driven increasingly by its own destructive side effects: drugs to treat
burgeoning allergies, therapies to treat stress, green consumer goods
to help us do our bit, an environmental clean-up industry (especially

busy after military conflicts), tourism which feeds on the need to ‘get
away from it all’, an insurance industry that thrives on the proliferation
of risk, and so on. But to call this ‘reflexivity’ in an objective sense,

as Beck makes clear, is not the same thing as a culture of refl exivity:
it actually underscores the lack of enlightened and interdisciplinary
reflection that engages scientific, moral and aesthetic questions,

that empowers citizens to exert more influence, or that forces

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