Page 30 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 25

99
inclination’ more amenable to the symbolic push and pull of the
publicity industries.
In the end an opinion no longer even needs to be capable of verbalisation;
it embraces not only any habit that finds expression in some kind of notion
– the kind of opinion shaped by religion, custom, mores and simple ‘prejudice’
against which public opinion was called in as a critical standard in the
eighteenth century – but simply all modes of behaviour. 100

What drives much of Habermas’s writing after Structural Transformation
is precisely the goal of showing how this trade-off between democratic
expansion and degradation might be conceived as something other
than fateful tragedy.

CRITICAL PUBLICITY AND LATE CAPITALISM

The first tentative steps towards this ‘reconstructive turn’ are,
however, taken in the closing pages of Structural Transformation.
Though Habermas has no desire to see the promises of the bourgeois
model redeemed in full – such hopes would be both unrealistic and
dangerous – he does ponder on the possibilities for a renaissance of
critical publicity within late capitalist democracies.
In the first instance, if the bourgeois model of critical publicity is

to prove relevant to late capitalism then the state must be accorded
a different role from that of the liberal phase. The altered scope of
state activity demands an increase in critical publicity and scrutiny.
To narrowly conceive of parliament as the public sphere writ large,
corralling public opinion into a singular arena, would be to support
an atrophied model of democracy. The changed scope of state activity
is not to be lamented, but does demand new thinking on the ways
in which it can be exposed to critical publicity. 101
Apart from the dangers of narrowing the methods and scope of
deliberation, to privilege Parliament is to reinforce a monocentric
model of power which is unrealistic and regressive. Critical publicity,
according to Habermas, must also be extended to those agencies
(special-interest groups, corporations, professional associations,
parties and so forth) which interact with the state:

Not only organs of state but all institutions that are publicistically influential
in the political public sphere have been bound to publicity because the
process in which societal power is transformed into political power is as

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