Page 61 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere

Since Structural Transformation

In this chapter we trace some of the key developments in Habermas’s
thinking on the public sphere since Structural Transformation. The
political public sphere has not received the same degree of explicit
attention in his subsequent writings but, despite the broad territory
over which Habermasian critical theory has ranged, the concept has
remained implicitly and stubbornly central throughout.
In Structural Transformation, as we saw, Habermas combined
discussion of the substantive history of the public sphere with
contemporaneous intellectual discourses on the concepts of publicity
and public opinion. During the late 1960s, in a series of important
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essays (collected in English under the title Toward a Rational Society),
Habermas focused on the task of developing a conceptual apparatus
with which the social sciences could approach problems of democracy.
But the essays were strongly wedded to their particular historical
context. They were written in the shadow of vociferous student
protest and talk of a ‘new sensibility’ which stood opposed to the

stifling consensus politics and productivist ideologies of post-war
Germany. These essays remain insightful today because they help
us understand the trajectory of Habermas’s thinking on the public
sphere. But they also provide some food for thought in the context of
contemporary debates. We will begin here, then, before considering
some of Habermas’s later conceptual manoeuvres.

SCIENTISM AND POLITICS

A central problematic for Habermas at this time was captured in
the title of one of his essays: ‘The Scientisation of Politics and
Public Opinion’. The target of his critique was the consolidation
of a ‘scientistic’ model of politics, a model which envisaged a set of
relationships between ‘experts’, political leaders and the citizenry
very differently from either the bourgeois model elucidated in
Structural Transformation or Habermas’s own radicalised post-liberal
model. Scientism was, according to Habermas, heavily infused into

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