Page 29 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

24 Jürgen Habermas

of plebiscites (including opinion polls and media vox pops as well as
formal ballots) and the number of people at liberty to participate in
them has been dramatically expanded. Moreover, today’s plebiscitary
culture does routinely acknowledge the problem of the ill-informed
citizen, even if opinion polls and focus groups are indifferent to it.
It’s widely agreed that citizens should be aware of the propositions
and beliefs underpinning each option on the ballot paper before they
exercise their choice. But the governing logic here is not that of the
public sphere: today’s ethic of good citizenship does not demand that
our opinions are ‘tested out’ in the argumentative crossfire of the

coffee house or, for that matter, the Internet discussion group. Rather,
the governing logic is that of the market: the analogy is the educated
consumer who, before plucking goods from the supermarket shelf,
carefully considers the range of choices on offer and the cases that
competing corporations make for their products. ‘Citizens relate to
the state not primarily through political participation but by adopting
a general attitude of demand.’ 95
If a lack of widespread participation in political debate renders
the political public sphere more intensively mediated in one sense
(politics is something you read about, see on the television and make
yes/no responses to, not something you do), then it is rendered more
immediate in another sense: the political public sphere is taken up
almost entirely with the relationship between lay individuals and
professional politicians vying to win their acclaim. Peer-to-peer public
96
debate becomes an increasingly marginal practice. Habermas does
not claim that there is no longer any horizontal political debate
to speak of, but that such debate is rarely public: ‘the political

discussions are for the most part confined to in-groups, to family,
friends, and neighbors who generate a rather homogeneous climate
97
of opinion anyway’.
For Habermas, the ‘public sphere’ has become merely the aggregate
of individualised preferences, an administrative variable brought
into the circuit of power only when its presence is functionally
required: ‘Today occasions for identification have to be created –

98
the public sphere has to be “made”, it is not “there” anymore.’
In this context, Habermas talks of a shift away from the ‘critical
publicity’ that underpinned the bourgeois model, towards that
of ‘manipulative publicity’. Where public deliberation provides a
bulwark against prejudice, reactionism and parochial perspective,
opinion in late capitalism has been reduced to a ‘mood-dependent

23/8/05 09:36:21
Goode 01 chaps 24
Goode 01 chaps 24 23/8/05 09:36:21