Page 49 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

44 Jürgen Habermas

This is ambiguous between what objectively affects or has an impact on
everyone as seen from an outsider’s perspective, and what is recognised
as a matter of common concern by participants. The idea of a public
sphere as an arena of collective self-determination does not sit well with
approaches that would appeal to an outsider’s perspective to delimit its
proper boundaries. Thus it is the second, participant’s perspective that is
relevant here. Only participants themselves can decide what is and what is
not of common concern to them. However, there is no guarantee that all
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of them will agree.
This observation lends weight to the case for treating the boundaries
between the public and the private as both provisional and

reflexive. As we have noted, both socialist and feminist politics

have reconfigured these boundaries by pushing, respectively, the
work sphere and the domestic sphere – hitherto ‘private’ concerns
– onto the public agenda. The boundaries are historically contextual
and, for a progressive democratic politics they cannot be fi xed a
priori but instead remain subject to the push and pull of public
deliberation. The virtue of this position is that it avoids the moral
vacuum risked by those who reject the very idea of such a boundary
on account of historical evidence showing how it has been exploited
by patriarchal and capitalist interests using ‘privacy’ as a cover for
manipulative practices: Fraser’s corrective reminds us that a politics
of the public sphere must, in fact, extend to that liminal zone rather
than restricting itself to the comfort zone of a ‘natural’ public interest.
As such, the idea of the public sphere provides resources for dealing
with the question of privacy and public interest in a way that avoids
the twin pitfalls of ethical relativism and elitism. Ethical relativism
is the logical conclusion of a free-market populism (often espoused
by popular media) which equates the ‘public interest’ with whatever
the public happen to be ‘interested’ in, and which is indifferent
to questions of prurience and privacy. The elitism often expressed
by politicians, on the other hand, looks to opinion leaders and
moral guardians to determine the boundaries of public interest and
to protect society from its own prurience or from its majoritarian
impulse to control, surveil and micro-manage everyday life. The idea

of a reflexive public sphere offers us a way into thinking critically
about those disciplinary mechanisms (which are in no small part self-
disciplining mechanisms, as Foucault and his followers have taught
us) which target aspects of social life that, in circular fashion, only
become publicly consequential (that is, ‘moral’) by dint of those very

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