Page 65 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

60 Jürgen Habermas

But the smooth reproduction of a system through adaptation to
changing environmental variables (or, indeed, the historically
necessary replacement of a moribund system, as in Marxist variants
of the technocratic imagination), is not a goal. It’s an abstract idea
(based on the human impulse to refashion social systems in the
image of natural systems) which frames competing interpretations of
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‘reproduction’ and ‘environment’, and concrete policy proposals.
Decisionism models, on the other hand, acknowledged an irreducibly
contingent core at the heart of political decision-making processes
whilst upholding the myth of a value-free scientifi c domain, as
if experts could proceed only in the service of truth and did not
have to make choices and selections according to exterior motives
– ethical impulses, political views, competition for research funding
and so forth. The decisionistic model laid itself open to the charge of
political relativism. The technocratic model at least had the virtue of
inviting a less fatalistic attitude, upholding scientific rigour as the last

line of defence. Habermas himself adheres to a model of democracy
premised on rational standards of communication but, as we shall
see, his vision of a self-limiting procedural rationalism differs greatly
from that of the technocratic imagination.
The technocratic ideal falls short on at least three counts. First,

it fails to reflect properly on the key values (including principles
of ‘unconstrained discussion’, ‘uncompelled consensus’ and the
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horizontal ethics of peer review) which implicitly underpin the
scientific community and serve as evaluative criteria for ‘good
science’. Second, it fails to recognise that these criteria may also be
productively applied to normative discourses: within the scientifi c
community itself, questions and statements of ‘ought’ (relating to the
comparative merits of various research proposals in terms of ethics

or community benefit, for example) are as prevalent as those relating
to the communication of facts and results. The principles of dialogic
exchange and unconstrained discussion are, as we saw in Structural
Transformation, those that Habermas believes must be applied to all
types of normative discourse. Third, however, Habermas claims that
these scientific standards, contrary to the positivistic perception,

do in fact reflect a particular and historically located set of goals
– those of ‘truth’, ‘demystification’ and ‘progress’. To that extent,

then, if Habermas himself is to avoid falling into the relativism and
irrationalism for which he criticises decisionism, he must articulate
why these very European-sounding virtues are more than just values,
more than just impulse reactions driven by a distaste for political

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