Page 6 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Introduction

There is a paradox in the reception of the Habermasian idea of the
public sphere. On the one hand, it seems like well-trodden territory.
In fact, it is now increasingly dismissed as idealistic, Eurocentric
and unwittingly patriarchal. On the other hand, it continues to be
routinely invoked in debates around democracy, citizenship and
communication. There’s a certain parallel in the stubborn refusal of
‘ideology’ to disappear from the lexicon of social thought, despite the
intellectual ‘passing’ of Marx, or the stickiness of the ‘unconscious’
long after the Freudians left the building. This book is motivated at
least in part by a sense that when a key concept or intellectual fi gure
is declared passé, the time is ripe for a reappraisal. What has Habermas
contributed to current thinking? And if we want to understand the
legacy of Habermasian thinking, we should at least try to churn up
this well-trodden ground to see if there are any hidden valuables to
be unearthed.
The book has several aims. First, it offers the reader an introduction
to the concept of the public sphere as it has been developed by
Habermas. Although it does not provide a comprehensive overview
of every aspect of Habermas’s critical theory, it does situate the idea
of the public sphere, which occupied him early on in his career, in
the context of subsequent developments in his thinking. Critical
commentaries on Habermas have often treated the public sphere as a
discrete topic. I hope to show that it remains fundamental to his entire
intellectual project, even where it receives less explicit attention.
Second, I offer a critical but sympathetic reading of Habermas.
Because I want to focus on sorting those insights that are most
valuable in the context of contemporary debates from those that
are not, I adopt what many may see as a skewed approach. I discuss
a range of criticisms and secondary commentaries on Habermas, but
I give most attention to those critics who share Habermas’s concern
with the problems of democracy, communication and citizenship.
Unlike many commentaries, I do not devote a large amount of space
to the great ‘theory wars’ that separate Habermas from opponents
such as Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, for
whom Habermas is scarcely even asking the right questions. In taking
this approach, I hope to be able to provide a productive ‘internal

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