Page 75 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

70 Jürgen Habermas

media, which ‘connect up interactions in space and time into more
and more complex networks that no one has to comprehend or
40
be responsible for’. Money and administrative logic increasingly
pervade those aspects of social life which are most valued as sites
of ‘meaning’ in which social actors develop understandings and
interpretations of the subjective, social and objective worlds. The
commodification of culture; the interventions of expert systems into

everyday life signalled by the culture of welfarism; and, importantly,
the co-option of institutions of the public sphere by fi nancial and
strategic interests: these processes are now conceived by Habermas
in terms of a ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ by the system.
The role of law in modern societies takes on a particular signifi cance
in the colonisation of the lifeworld thesis. For the most part, the non-
discursive media of money and administrative power are, in the last
analysis, institutionalised in law:

law now has the position of a metainstitution; it serves as a kind of insurance
against breakdown … The political order as a whole is constituted as a legal
order, but it is laid like a shell around a society whose core domains are by
no means legally organised throughout. 41
In order to afford social actors the space to pursue their own goals
within differentiated societies, law in modernity has become
differentiated from morality. The medium of law prescribes moral
boundaries for social actors but remains indifferent to the moral world-
views and motives of actors remaining within those boundaries.
Law necessarily affords social actors the opportunity to adopt

opportunistic and unreflective orientations towards law. The danger,
for Habermas, is that opportunistic orientations become all-pervasive.
Where citizens are not engaged in public spheres critically refl ecting
on the norms of a society’s legal framework, law itself congeals into
an arcane ‘second nature’, fatalistically externalised by social actors.
Habermas terms this phenomenon ‘juridifi cation’.
The increasing mutual autonomy of legal, moral, aesthetic and
scientific discourses is, in fact, a function of the rationalisation of

the lifeworld, rather than its colonisation. But rather than just
advancing under conditions of mutual autonomy, Habermas argues
that these spheres of discourse have become pathologically insulated
from one another, fragmented into expert cultures. Discourses of
morality, aesthetics and science all take on the appearance of ‘second
nature’ systems mediated through power (e.g. law), money (e.g. the

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