Page 28 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 23

statistic, have all but dissolved the image of a critical public sphere;
a sense of culture as ‘political’ by virtue of being an end-in-itself for
producer and recipient alike has faded; so too have the symbiotic
relations between the public and the private, and between the cultural
and political public spheres. For Habermas, it is not the fact that state
and society have become interlocked per se that erodes the principle
of critical publicity. What matters is that this process erodes the
old institutional bases of critical publicity without supplying new
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ones. On the one hand, institutions of society (private interest
groups, political parties and the like) become part of the state power
structure. On the other hand, the state (and the culture of welfarism
more generally) has reached into once private spheres of society with
ambivalent consequences.
In classical liberalism, the parliamentary legislature, representing
public opinion, mediates between competing private interests and
executive authority. But the expansion of state activity exceeds the
capacities of parliamentary process. Parliament becomes a cumbersome
bottleneck in need of containment. It increasingly resembles a rubber-
stamping committee: ‘The process of the politically relevant exercise
and equilibration of power now takes place directly between the
private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public
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administration.’ That’s not to say that Parliament was entirely

stripped of symbolic significance, especially as organised capitalism
initiated such a visible expansion of state activity. (Since the 1980s,
however, ‘disorganised capitalism’ has ushered in a much less visible
expansion of state activity, obfuscated by a neo-liberal mythology of
‘rolling back the state’.) But parties of government and opposition
have generally been complicit in what Claus Offe has called the
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‘separation of form and content’ in parliamentary democracies.
Parliamentary ‘debate’ became increasingly subjected to techniques
of stage management. Internal party debate was similarly disciplined
as increasingly defensive ‘catch-all’ parties scrapped over the votes

of unaffiliated and apolitical citizens. 94
During the twentieth century, then, Habermas sees a tragic trade-
off unfolding. The expansion of democracy has come at the cost of
its continual degradation. Where the bourgeois model conceived
the act of voting merely as a necessary conclusion – a ‘guillotine’ –
imposed on drawn-out processes of deliberation, today’s ‘plebiscitary’
democracy is content to accept voting and democratic participation
as synonymous (which is why low electoral turnouts are treated as the
most scandalous indicators of the state of democracy). The number

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