Page 63 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

58 Jürgen Habermas

division of labour between ‘politicians’ who carry forward the values
and goals of society, on the one hand, and scientifi c ‘experts’ on
the other. Decisionism fatalistically accepted an irrational core at
the heart of political decision making. As for the citizenry at large,
the decisionistic model tended to conceive its role in plebiscitary
terms as the periodic acclamation and legitimation of the politicians.
It would be counterproductive and inefficient to have a citizenry

engaged in protracted deliberation over ultimately non-rationalisable
5
values. Whilst a particular society may have an ethical preference for
democracy, the only ‘rational’ basis for public input was, ultimately,
to avert the entropic consequences of a legitimation defi cit.
By comparison, the technocratic model sought to enlarge the scope

of scientific rationality. It didn’t exclude outright the possibility of
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rationalising political power. The feasibility and the consequences
of political goals themselves could be rationally assessed. Taken
to its logical conclusion, the technocratic model evoked a society
in which values (ends) are derived from technology (means). A
cybernetic system of feedback control made critical refl ection on
social values redundant because their validity could be read off from
their contribution to the smooth reproduction of the ‘system’ itself,
in the context of its changing ‘environment’.
The technocratic model demanded a radical reappraisal of the
relationship between experts and politicians. In the decisionistic
model the expert was conceived as dependent on the political actor.
The expert would be called upon to assess mechanisms for achieving
a prescribed range of goals. In the technocratic model the relationship
between political actor and expert was reversed. The techniques
developed by experts would shape the goals of the political actor.
Though few today would openly endorse the hard-nosed version
of technocracy described here, this intellectually ‘passé’ model still
looms large in contemporary debates about political culture: the term
‘pragmatism’ is routinely invoked either affirmatively to champion

the passing of ideology and dogma in politics, or pejoratively to decry
the rise of the technocrat and the career politician for whom values
seem to be invoked only opportunistically. 7
Obviously, the Machiavellian motif of the politician as, fi rst and
foremost, a tactician or strategist is no more a distinctively late modern
phenomenon than is the charge of naïve idealism levelled at those
who demand that politicians act first and foremost as moral agents.

However, the technocratic model signalled at least one distinctively
modern aspect: political ‘techniques’ (including public relations as

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Goode 01 chaps 58 23/8/05 09:36:25