Page 51 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

46 Jürgen Habermas

politics which promotes greater discursive reflexivity on the nature,

scope and boundaries of the public agenda need not, in itself at least,
threaten civil liberties.
But Fraser is not talking simply about topics of public interest.
She is also raising the question of deliberation oriented towards the
establishment of the common good:

This is a view of the public sphere that we would today call civic–republican, as
opposed to liberal–individualist. Briefly, the civic–republican model stresses
a view of politics as people reasoning together to promote a common good
that transcends the sum of individual preferences … On this view, private
interests have no proper place in the political public sphere. At best, they
are the prepolitical starting point of deliberation, to be transformed and
transcended in the course of debate. 41

The civic–republican view legitimately corrects the bourgeois model’s
tendency to view the common good as something given which can
be revealed through public discussion. The common good is, instead,
conceived as something that can potentially be generated through
dialogue. This is a ‘deliberative’ model of democracy, one which
Habermas revisits in his more recent work, The Inclusion of the Other
(see Chapter 3). The problem with Habermas’s model, however, is

that it ‘conflates the ideas of deliberation and the common good by
assuming that deliberation must be deliberation about the common
42
good’. In other words, debate is implicitly trained on the question,
‘What will be good for us?’ This emphasis on the first person plural

(‘a single, all-encompassing “we”’) tends to reinforce the dominance
of particular groups and to disadvantage others whose voices have
not been well heard in the past and who, therefore, have lacked the

power to shape the definition of who ‘we’ are that now confronts
them. Fraser argues, then, that any model of democracy that rules
out the articulation of self- or private interests undercuts its own
progressive aspirations. ‘The postulation of a common good shared
by exploiters and exploited may well be a mystifi cation.’ 43
Fraser’s emphasis on the need to conceive of the public sphere
as not only plural but also allowing for spaces of withdrawal and
exclusivity among interest groups rightly addresses the requirement

for subordinate groups to reflect on and clarify their identities and
interests. We might also add that adversarial encounters and criticism
from other interest groups in the public sphere at large can contribute

to those processes of reflection and clarification. But we should

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