Page 47 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

42 Jürgen Habermas

the media), this response seems hopelessly naïve at best, and fraught
with the ethical dangers of a paternalistic, victim-centred welfarism
at worst. A second response is to hold fast to the link between socio-
economic equality and participatory parity and therefore fatalistically
accept the circle in all its viciousness. A third, however, would be
to relativise that link and look towards the virtuous rather than
the vicious movement of the circle: the greater the provision of
resources for participation in and access to the public sphere, the
greater chance disadvantaged groups have of getting their voices
heard, of collectively interpreting and articulating their own interests
and needs, and of realising greater socio-economic and participatory
parity. The link between ‘life chances’ and ‘discourse chances’, to
use a neater vocabulary, is of critical importance to any theory of
democracy and it is, as Fraser argues, obscured by classical liberalism
and, at best, under-theorised in Structural Transformation. The fact
that it is also less straightforward than Fraser implies may, in fact,
entitle us to a shred more optimism.
A second assumption underpinning the bourgeois public sphere
is: ‘that the proliferation of a multiplicity of competing publics is
necessarily a step away from, rather than toward, greater democracy,
and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable
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to a nexus of multiple publics’. Fraser’s arguments here follow on
from her contention (noted above) that ‘it is not possible to insulate
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special discursive arenas from the effects of social inequality’. It
follows that, in order to build solidarities, clarify identities, interests

and objectives, and to find their ‘own voice’ independently of the
standard modes of talk and the constructions of ‘us’ (such as the
‘national interest’ or ‘humanity’) that covertly serve the interests of
the dominant, subordinate groups require their own alternative or
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‘subaltern’ spaces of discursive deliberation. Fraser is quick to point
out that not all subaltern publics are democratic and egalitarian in
structure. But more importantly, perhaps, she distances her arguments
from political and cultural separatism:

in stratified societies, subaltern publics have a dual character. On the one
hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other
hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities
directed towards wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these
two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. 36

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