Page 64 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 59

well as public administration) would become a rapidly developing
and expanding area of ‘scientific’ inquiry and knowledge production

– a major growth industry of the twentieth century, in fact.
One important ambiguity in the technocratic model was not
problematised by Habermas. This is probably because it’s an
ambiguity that also pervaded Habermas’s own thinking at this
stage. The problem is whether the technocratic model rests on the
assumption of a successful (or potentially successful) diffusion of a
‘technocratic consciousness’ among the citizenry. It’s not clear if the
public must necessarily endorse expertocracy, or whether a fatalistic
orientation or, say, the distractions and seductions of leisure and

consumption, might suffice. The technocratic model can, in theory,
live without the assumption of a powerful technocratic ideology by
conceiving the public realm as an environmental variable to which
the political system must always be ready to adapt. In contemporary
political culture there is, in fact, an ongoing tension between the
opportunistic deployment of moral and ethical rhetoric (‘populism’),
examples of carefully moderated procedural visibility (the televising
of parliamentary debate, for example), and esoteric language games
that signify the impenetrability of the political ‘system’.
For Habermas, the technocratic world-view pervading political
culture was dangerous. He sought to challenge the integrity of both
a technocratic model premised on the fact or possibility of hyper-
rationalised political discourse, and a decisionistic model premised
upon the fact or possibility of a clear division between evaluative and
cognitive discourses. This challenge was part of a wider and, at the
8
time, controversial attack on positivism. A recurrent theme in that
dispute was the positivistic ideal of isolating discourses of facts and
norms from one another, whilst this ‘purifi ed’ scientifi c paradigm
refused to acknowledge its own internal values, namely a partisan
commitment to the principles of ‘Reason’, enlightenment, truth and
‘progress’ and a crusade against dogma and myth. But, according
to Habermas, the technocratic and decisionistic models of political

science each have their own specifi c flaws (and even some advantages).
Habermas himself concurs with the principle that values cannot be
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deduced from facts. But this doesn’t mean that values can somehow
be purged as in the technocratic imagination, or institutionally
separated as decisionism suggests. The idea that political science can

be insulated from specific value positions is untenable.
Technocrats erroneously imagine that the political ends they
pursue are intrinsic rather than the product of human decisions.

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