Page 62 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 57

the political culture and institutions of the post-war democracies
(particularly the Federal Republic) although it was the intellectual
affirmation of the scientistic model – a then-prevalent positivism

– which provided the main target for his critique.
Positivism, of course, has roots stretching back through the
Enlightenment to fi gures such as Comte and Hume. But the recent
memories of acts carried out in the name of National Socialist (and
Soviet) ‘science’ gave added impetus to the struggle to purge political
values from science: to remove all traces of normativity would be
to ensure the unhampered production of ‘valid’ knowledge, and to
liberate science from co-option and distortion by ideological interests.

In political science, specifically, the project to separate the ‘is’ and
the ‘ought’ had been advanced previously by Weber and Schumpeter
and was now (in the late 1960s) ‘unquestioned by modern political
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sociology’. The fundamental premise of a positivist social science
was that: ‘from theoretical knowledge we can at best, given specifi c
goals, derive rules for instrumental action. Practical knowledge, on
the contrary, is a matter of rules of communicative action and these
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standards cannot be grounded in a scientifically binding manner.’ To
that extent, the proper role of political science was to describe, model
and predict measurable phenomena and the causal relationships
between them, (the relationship between a political campaign and its

likely efficacy, for example), and not to evaluate or judge the moral
implications of goals pursued within the political realm. The outcome
would be an ‘apolitical’ political science. Science could furnish special
interest groups, such as parties, with knowledge, so long as the divorce
between theory and politics remained sacrosanct.
Habermas considered two sub-models of political scientism, both
of which have implications not only for the internal functioning
of political science but for conceptions of the political realm itself.
Both raised particular claims about the relationships between
experts (including political scientists themselves), politicians and
the citizenry. The ‘decisionistic’ and the ‘technocratic’ models,
discussed by Habermas, are best conceived not as mutually exclusive
black boxes but as poles on a continuum. The decisionistic model
occupied the more intellectually modest end of the continuum with
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Weber figuring as the key infl uence. Here, science imagined itself
to have a critical but self-limiting role within the political process: it
could provide instrumental knowledge and assessments of political

means but it could not apply scientific rationality to the process of
selecting between competing political ends. It called for a careful

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