Page 142 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 137

however, in imagining that autonomy derives from the essential
rights of the unencumbered self. For Habermas, it derives instead
from intersubjectivity itself.
As we have seen, Habermas argues that the fault-line of rights versus
values must itself be the subject of democratic deliberation, given that
the ‘moral point of view’ is always already ethically patterned within
a political culture. So, for example, Habermas recognises that the
welfare state does not simply refl ect abstract rights but also contributes
to their construction. These ‘rights’ therefore vary across welfare
systems. Despite notable differences between, say, the Scandanavian
and British models, most such systems embody cultural norms that

privilege specific life forms, including the nuclear family, heterosexual
marriage, long-term residence and a standardised working biography.
For Habermas, though, this does not mean that the idea of welfare
rights should be abandoned as some kind of patrician affront
(which is the drift of many Leftist, anarchist and neo-conservative
libertarian commentaries) but that we need to challenge the systemic
fundamentalism that lends itself to such brittle normativity. The
project of the welfare state needs to be continued, he says, at a ‘higher
level of refl ection’. 33
At the level of democratic culture itself, institutions of the political
public sphere have tended to embody class-, race- and gender-specifi c
cultures: the middle-class weighting of the new social and protest
movements; the privileged demographic skew of the media and
journalism professions; the lingering perceptions of patriarchy and
xenophobia attaching to trade union movements; and the old-boy
networks of the political parties. Again, these skews demand critical
scrutiny rather than the easier option of dismissing them simply as out
of touch and irrelevant. At the same time as Habermas’s critical theory
alerts us to the urgent project of reforming and rethinking these ‘old’
institutions, it also alerts us to the urgent project of rethinking politics
itself by critically interrogating new sites of political deliberation
and activity, that is, the proliferation of public spheres and tactical
networks that, even as they refuse to play the language games of the
old systemic elements of the state, the parties and the ‘mass’ media,
operate in a context unavoidably shaped by them. Both ‘projects’
are always already ‘unfi nished’.
John Keane offers a pithy riposte to those who would argue that
radical politics, in the guise of activist networks and subcultural
movements, must operate outside the shadow of the ‘state’ and ‘offi cial’
politics: civil society and the constitutional state, he argues, ‘must

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