Page 78 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 73

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to the problems of citizens living together. Habermas now speaks
of ‘discourse ethics’, a model which aspires towards more open,
egalitarian, frank but respectful dialogue between citizens with

differing interests and backgrounds who want to find better ways
of living together.

The four most important features [of discourse ethics] are: (i) that nobody
who could make a relevant contribution may be excluded; (ii) that all
participants are granted an equal opportunity to make contributions; (iii)
that the participants must mean what they say; and (iv) that communication
must be freed from external and internal coercion. 50

Although discourse ethics aspires to orient participants towards
the ‘moral point of view’ (to address the question of what is right
or best for all concerned and not just what is good for me or for
my ‘community’), it is in itself not a universal morality. When
we remember that what we are talking about is not simply a set
of abstract ideals, but the institutionalisation of discourse in real,
historically specific public spheres, we realise that discourse ethics

must be located somewhere in time and space; it must be ‘peopled’
by real live, embodied citizens who inhabit particular lifeworlds; it
will accrue codes, conventions and characteristics that can never
be culturally neutral. Spheres of communicative action are always
already ‘ethically patterned’ and culturally located: political cultures
will (or must be allowed to) develop in different ways across time
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and space. At the same time, Habermas refuses to concede that
the fundamental pragmatics of discourse or ‘argumentation’ are
culturally peculiar (a claim which would in any case substitute one
form of ethnocentrism for another): ‘we may assume that the practice

of deliberation and justification we call “argumentation” is to be
found in all cultures and societies (if not in institutionalised form,
then at least as informal practice) and that there is no functionally
equivalent alternative to this mode of problem solving’. 52
On the one hand, then, Habermas upholds a humanistic faith
in the communicative impulses of the world’s citizens. On the

other hand, this is not in itself sufficient to guarantee the spread
of communicative rationality in the real world: Habermas has been
forced to adopt the ultimately rather modest claim that the basic
presuppositions of argumentation ‘may provide an opportunity, given
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the predicament posed by the pluralism of worldviews’, and we may
only ‘hope that processes of socialisation and political forms of life

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