Page 141 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

136 Jürgen Habermas

purely contextualist positions seem unable to deal with is that the scope
of political issues and power relations in complex and interconnected
societies outstrips, and becomes increasingly indifferent to, patterns
of localised cultural narratives. Such narratives, in any case, are too
fluid and dynamic ever to provide a stable foundation for political

communities. At the same time, theorists including Giddens, Beck and
Habermas all suspect (or hope) that the global scope of key problems
in the risk society, most notably ecological issues, might provide at
least some foundation for the establishment of a universal interest
which could, under the sway of a cultural cosmopolitanism, nourish
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rather than erode tolerance and difference. But we should tread
with caution: the idea that ecological meltdown and other global
risks could level or even lessen the stark antagonisms of strategic
interests (something captured in Beck’s simplistic and misguided
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soundbite: ‘Poverty is hierarchic; smog is democratic’) rather than
intensify them, let alone lend itself to a culturally universal notion of
the common good, is idealistic at best and dangerous at worst.
For Habermas, attempting to deal with these questions entails
framing the new sub-politics within a very old context – that of the
liberal impulse to distinguish between rights and values coupled,
of course, with the Marxian impulse towards exposing the tension
between claim and reality. Perhaps this is the only way of envisaging
a rejuvenated political culture that can exert power from below
the threshold of a systematised formal democracy but above the
incommensurable plurality of localised lifeworlds. The only universal
Habermas permits critical theory to postulate outside the democratic
deliberations of the public sphere itself – and a provisional one at that
– is the most formal and minimal set of unavoidable presuppositions
which, as speakers and hearers, we necessarily employ when we
engage in discourse in ‘good faith’, believing in the possibility of
unforced agreement, even if that agreement is ultimately confi ned
to the principles by which we reach legitimate compromise. That
the claims we raise could ideally be redeemed through dialogue; that
we aim to make ourselves understood; and that we could somehow
discriminate between genuine and coerced agreement: these provide,
for Habermas, the necessary counterfactuals underpinning the messier
realities of communication pursued in good faith. The universalism of
the ‘moral’ point of view, for Habermas, remains strictly procedural

in this sense: its work, which is always unfinished, is to try to make
good those quaint liberal values of reciprocity and respect for the
integrity and autonomy of the other. Modern liberalism went wrong,

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