Page 45 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

40 Jürgen Habermas

Fraser is certainly correct to note the shift of emphasis in Habermas’s
later work. However, we should pause before we merrily eject the
principle of formally bracketing differences from a progressive
model of democracy. Rather than looking at this issue in terms of a
binary opposition, it may be more fruitful to consider the value of
formally bracketing status inequalities on the one hand and explicitly
thematising them on the other as two sides of the same coin, based on
the age-old trade-off between responsibilities and rights. Fraser seems,
quite laudably, to argue for the ‘right’ of participants to thematise
any perceived inequality which may affect the parity of discussion.
On the other hand, the requirement to bracket status differentials
could be conceived in terms of the responsibility of participants to
strive to avoid playing ‘power games’ within the deliberative arena
with the intention of subordinating fellow participants (implicit
slurs on someone’s background, status, or ethnicity, for example).
To simply postulate an ethic of mutual respect does not get us too
far in reducing intentional or unintentional, subtle and overt forms
of communicative manipulation or bad faith. But ejecting it from
our model of democracy would foster a moral vacuum and serve to
legitimise domineering techniques of debate and interaction. It’s
hard to see how this ethic intrinsically contradicts the egalitarian
principles Fraser espouses. Rather, it’s the failure to marry it to the
right to thematise and question asymmetries that is dangerous from
a democratic perspective.
For Fraser, however, my corrective would probably miss the main
point which is that

a necessary condition for participatory parity is that systemic social
inequalities be eliminated. This does not mean that everyone must have
exactly the same income, but it does require the sort of rough equality that
is inconsistent with systemically generated relations of dominance and
subordination. Pace liberalism, then, political democracy requires substantive
social equality. 32

This is a noble ideal but it draws on an undifferentiated notion of
equality that limits its theoretical and political value. We cannot
realistically avoid the task of differentiating between social inequalities

that clearly and significantly impinge upon the fairness and openness
of the democratic process and those that do not, though to be sure
this is no straightforward exercise and there are no objective, scientifi c
criteria available to us outside of public debate itself. Of course there

23/8/05 09:36:23
Goode 01 chaps 40
Goode 01 chaps 40 23/8/05 09:36:23