Page 68 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 63

theory of modernity and a reconstruction of the foundations of social
science. Habermas is an eclectic but honest scholar who acknowledges
his debts to the great figures of social theory whilst setting out to

reformulate some of their central ideas. The Theory of Communicative
Action is an immense and frustratingly dry piece of scholarship.
But the narrative of modernity and rationalisation developed in
The Theory of Communicative Action does resonate with the narrative
of the public sphere developed in Structural Transformation: in both,
the tale is one of missed opportunity, of suppressed emancipatory
potential and of modest fragments of optimism scattered across the
wasteland. Moreover, the concept of the public sphere is critically
important in The Theory of Communicative Action, even though it is
not the main focus of analysis. Rather than trying to follow every
twist and turn of this two-volume work, our purposes here are best
served by an initial statement of its main theses. In the fi rst instance,
Habermas argues that in order to comprehend processes of social
development and reproduction, we must engage ‘society’ at two
levels, at the level of the ‘lifeworld’ and at the level of the ‘system’.
At the level of the ‘lifeworld’ we aim to make sense of social processes
as the outcome of social actors’ intentions and value orientations. At
the same time, the consequences of social action routinely exceed
actors’ intentions: at the level of the ‘system’ we aim to comprehend
the manner in which social actions intermesh above the will and/
or consciousness of social actors. Habermasian sociology, in other
words, aims to combine ‘systems-theoretic’ approaches favoured by
deterministic Marxism and functionalism, on the one hand, with
‘action-theoretic’ approaches characteristic of Weberian sociology,
hermeneutics and phenomenology, on the other.
The development of modern societies can be grasped as a process
of progressive rationalisation. But this insight depends on a particular
conception of rationality. ‘Purposive-rational’ (or ‘strategic’) action
is made synonymous with rationality itself in so much social theory,
including Marxism, Weberian approaches, the writings of the
Frankfurt School, and those of Michel Foucault. But this is a one-
sided account of rationality. Habermas’s three-dimensional model not
only considers the possibility of ‘rationalising’ expressive, aesthetic
and ‘dramaturgical’ actions in the strictly limited or procedural
16
sense we have already discussed at the end of Chapter 1; it also
argues for treating both strategic and dramaturgical models of
action as derivative of and subordinate to a third model that he
calls ‘communicative action’.

23/8/05 09:36:26
Goode 01 chaps 63
Goode 01 chaps 63 23/8/05 09:36:26