Page 32 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 27

out a newspaper. The public is no longer composed of persons formally and
materially on equal footing. 104

Certainly Habermas declines to analyse extant and potential policy
measures to address these inequalities. (Such indeterminacy is a source
of frustration to many readers and commentators but also helps to
keep Structural Transformation relevant and thought-provoking some
decades later.) But the baseline argument remains that questions of
democracy cannot be sheared off from questions of social inequality.
(I explore this issue further in Chapter 2.) On the other hand,
Habermas does not want to see the distinction between the public
and the private extinguished altogether. He continues to value the

idea of a space of reflection and clarification which feeds off and into
but is not governed by the public sphere. But this discourse of private
autonomy – what it means and whose interests it serves – is a vexed
one: ‘privacy’ can shield manipulative power relations within the
domestic sphere, for example, just as it can empower individuals to
pursue their own life projects without public interference. Habermas’s
notion of privacy remains unsatisfactorily vague and I try to tease
this issue out more satisfactorily in the following chapter.
Structural Transformation scarcely affords more clarity when it
comes to the institutional dimensions of a reconstructed public
sphere. For here Habermas is concerned less with imagining
new political institutions as such as he is with the conscious and
progressive application of the principle of critical publicity to existing
institutions: parties, unions, extra-parliamentary decision-making
spheres, media, special interest groups and so forth. The downside to
this is an implicit conservatism: the focus is more on reforming and
renewing extant institutions than it is on imagining new ones. I shall
argue in later chapters that this conservatism rears its head even more
strongly in Habermas’s recent work on constitutionalism. But, by and
large, Habermas has always been less concerned with the question of
how radically we should rethink the institutions of democracy and the
public sphere than with developing frameworks which can help us
to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of particular institutions.
This formalistic orientation was already showing through even in
Structural Transformation, his most concrete, historical investigation,
in which he sketches some basic democratic values that prefi gure his
more recent ideas around ‘discourse ethics’.
Public spheres must be judged according to their inclusivity:
critical attention must focus on the ways in which particular groups

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