Page 31 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

26 Jürgen Habermas

much in need of criticism and control as the legitimate exercise of political
domination over society. 102

Moreover, it would be dangerous to overlook those agencies which,
whilst not accruing any direct political power, nevertheless infl uence
the political process. Whatever ‘public interest’ credentials accrue,
for example, to a media institution or campaign group, such
organisations cannot legitimately stand aloof from the obligations
of critical publicity. In other words, institutions that claim to be
institutions of the public sphere must, themselves, be opened up
to the critical scrutiny of a wider public sphere: Habermas, then,
advocates a refl exive publicity. As long as public spheres operate above
the heads of consumers and not in interaction with a critically
debating public, they remain sorely lacking as public spheres.
Politically relevant institutions

must institutionally permit an intraparty or intra-association democracy – to
allow for unhampered communication and public rational–critical debate.
In addition, by making the internal affairs of the parties and special-interest
associations public, the linkage between such an intraorganisational public
sphere and the public sphere of the entire public has to be assured. Finally,
the activities of the organisations themselves – their pressure on the state
apparatus and their use of power against one another, as well as the manifold
relations of dependency and of economic intertwining – need a far-reaching
publicity. This would include, for instance, requiring that the organisations
provide the public with information concerning the source and deployment
of their financial means. 103

Habermas’s fragmentary remarks betray a rather pained ambivalence
rather than a nostalgic attitude towards the bourgeois model and
its idealised separation of the public and the private. On the one
hand, if public authority can be understood realistically only as the

outcome of conflicting ‘private’ interests (in which the so-called
‘public sector’ is also implicated), so the reverse is true: the ‘private
sphere’ of civil society does, and indeed must, bear the imprint of
public intervention. The bourgeois model cannot live up to its own
ideals of universality and equality of participation by reference to
merely de jure, that is, negative guarantees:

[T]he formation of a public opinion in the strict sense is not effectively
secured by the mere fact that anyone can freely utter his opinion and put

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