Page 77 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

72 Jürgen Habermas

focuses on issues of constitutionalism, the idea of a post-national
cosmopolitan law, and the question of human rights. On the surface,
at least, this drift seems to represent a rather undesirable turn away
from the problems of the ‘everyday’ lifeworld in favour of a focus on
large-scale institutional structures. Habermas’s critical theory seems
to become rather aloof from the grassroots concerns of the social
and political movements to which he appealed in his earlier work.
I want to try and rescue the notion of a bottom-up, as opposed to
top-down, project of communicative democratisation from this later
work (though as I shall argue, the term ‘bottom-up’ is a reductive
shorthand). Paradoxically, however, Habermas’s recent work, despite
this ‘macro-juridical’ drift, does in fact engage with issues of cultural
difference, cultural power and the cultural dimensions of citizenship
and democracy, much more explicitly and in greater depth than his
earlier writings. In one sense there is a greater ‘localism’ as well as a
greater ‘globalism’ at play now. We can think of this as an ‘ethico-
cultural’ shift because, in emphasising the importance of particular
cultural life forms for any understanding of contemporary citizenship
and democracy, it brings ethical, and not just moral, dimensions to
the surface.
The ethico-cultural shift in Habermas’s later writings impacts not
only on the interpretation of contemporary political problems but on
the status of critical theory itself. Habermas has provided compelling
arguments against the nihilistic and relativistic implications of the
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post-structuralist turn in critical theory. At the heart of these
arguments – though there is not space to rehearse them at length
here – is Habermas’s accusation of ‘performative contradiction’,
namely the tendency within post-structuralist thinking to deploy
rational argument to negate or at least undercut the very idea of
reason; and to mount the grandest of narratives in a crusade against
grand narratives. But Habermas has struggled to establish universalist
foundations for his own theory of communicative rationality without
lapsing into metaphysical thought, abandoning an early project to
elucidate a so-called ‘quasi-transcendental’ emancipatory human
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interest, turning instead to the ‘universal pragmatics’ of everyday
communication. Whilst he has never given up on the idea that the
theory of communicative action is more than just a contingent and
ethnocentric preference for a particular way of life, he has certainly
conceded that it makes sense only in the context of the development
of a culturally located ‘ethos’ which favours communicative over
‘costlier’ (namely violent or atomistic and opportunistic) approaches

23/8/05 09:36:27
Goode 01 chaps 72
Goode 01 chaps 72 23/8/05 09:36:27