Page 67 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

62 Jürgen Habermas

to develop a model of ‘procedural rationality’ by which we could
judge the legitimacy of procedures for argumentation, agreements
and compromises.
Habermas, then, wanted to carve out a third space between
positivism and the ‘voluntarism’ he saw pervading the student
movement. He proposed that we aspire to a vision of a democratically
structured society that would embody ‘the dialectic of enlightened
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will and self-conscious potential’. We should respect the integrity
of scientific and evaluative discourses by acknowledging both
their analytical autonomy and their practical interdependence: the
language of science, of technology, of means, always entails normative
considerations, just as the language of values, goals and ends, misfi res
when it’s unhinged from pragmatic considerations. Acknowledging
and institutionalising this interdependence and autonomy would,
for Habermas, be the real mark of enlightenment. But where the
‘discourse of potential’ lends itself to a division of labour between
experts and lay actors (which has somehow to be mediated), only
citizens themselves have privileged access to the needs, desires and
aspirations that constitute the other moment in that dialectic.
But, still, it’s another thing altogether to demonstrate why, in
particular, a universal, democratic and egalitarian institutionalisation
of ‘will’ makes for a more ‘rational’ (rather than merely ethically
preferable) organisation of society. If the ideals of unforced
consensus, peer scrutiny and unconstrained discourse make for
‘good science’ (and some may question even this), why do these
standards necessarily make for ‘good values’ and ‘good morals’,
over and above other historical standards such as tradition, religion,
birthright and the like. These essays cannot tell us why. But they
provide a compelling critique of the contradictions and distorted
self-understandings of political scientism – and therefore still have
something to say about the contradictions of political culture today;
and they may offer us some insight into today’s protest movements
which, like the anti-globalisation movement, are still implicated
in that tension between ‘actionism’ and the need for debate about
alternative directions for society.

SYSTEM, LIFEWORLD AND COMMUNICATIVE ACTION
If the aims of Structural Transformation were ambitious, they were
nothing compared to those of Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative
Action. Here Habermas set out to achieve no less than a systematic

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