Page 18 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 13

appealed to a public use of reason, free of manipulation and coercion:
a key virtue was thinking for one’s self publicly, that is, as a member
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of humanity and not as a private individual. The public should take
their lead from the philosophers engaged in ‘pure’ reasoning, and
‘[e]ach person was called to be a “publicist”, a scholar “whose writings
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speak to his public, the world”’. ‘Autonomy’ is a prerequisite for
participation in the Kantian republic: ‘Only property-owning private
people were admitted to a public engaged in critical political debate,
for their autonomy was rooted in the sphere of commodity exchange
and hence was joined to the interest in its preservation as a private
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sphere.’ Harmonious social relations would be possible because a
free civil society would bring about a cosmopolitan consciousness and
the contradiction between ‘private vices’ and ‘public virtues’ would
be resolved. For everyone who had achieved the requisite autonomy,
private aspirations (the maintenance of a ‘free civil society’) coincided
with the aspirations of all who joined him in the public sphere of
deliberation. A person who is ‘his own master’ serves only himself
and, by extension, ‘the commonwealth’ of all persons, including
those who are not yet capable of full citizenship but who implicitly
share an interest in the renewal of a civil society which grants them
equal chances of membership, regardless of status: ‘the property-less
were not citizens at all, but persons who with talent, industry, and
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luck some day might be able to attain that status’. For Kant, the role
of public deliberation is not to generate consensus or compromise,
for ‘pure reasoning’ rather than dialogue would reveal the truth
of things; instead, public deliberation, under the guidance of the
scholars, provided something of a training in the art of ‘thinking
for oneself’ and a continual reminder to think one’s thoughts in the
context of the universal ‘public’. This early encounter with Kant is

significant, for Habermas’s entire oeuvre bears the imprint of Kantian
thinking: he follows Kant in developing a universalist framework,
though he substitutes the monologic conceit of ‘pure reasoning’ for
the rule of dialogue and open-ended argumentation; and he favours
Kant’s model of a ‘reasoning’ public over Rousseau’s ‘common sense’,
though he is only interested in a republicanism that can accommodate
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liberalism’s concern for the rights of the individual.
But Habermas also lives in the shadows of Hegel and Marx who
both abhorred such abstract reasoning. The Kantian system contained
a debilitating impasse: a perfectly ‘free’ civil society (the ‘juridical
condition’), the necessary foundation of the ‘condition of autonomy’,
had never existed in reality. Act two of the narrative sees Habermas

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Goode 01 chaps 13 23/8/05 09:36:20