Page 8 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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Excavations: The History of a Concept

In this book I hope to make the case for seeing The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere as a work that still resonates
with some of the urgent questions facing the ‘democratic project’
today. In privileging this work and the category ‘public sphere’, I’m
suggesting that if we want to enrich our grasp of the problems facing
the democratic imagination, we would do well to read Habermas’s
later works through the lens of Structural Transformation and its key

concerns. Structural Transformation invites us to reflect closely on
the nature of public deliberation and the democratic process at a
time when the rhetoric of ‘citizenship’ has become such common
currency – especially, though not exclusively, in Western democracies
– against a backdrop of striking developments: increasingly
sophisticated political marketing techniques; changes in media
culture that implicate the very institutions which aspire to connect
citizens with the powerful; an ascendant politics of ethnicity and
ethno-nationalism which can sometimes displace and sometimes
appropriate the discourse of citizenship; and patterns of political
behaviour, such as staggeringly low voting rates, which highlight
widespread disaffection with the offi cial institutions of democracy,
especially in the younger generations.
A historicist reading of Structural Transformation could read off the
present and future in terms of an unfolding historical dialectic: either
a negative dialectic in which the potential for a truly democratic and
rational public sphere has been irreversibly squandered, or a positive
dialectic that gestures towards a radical–democratic endgame in which
the rationality of the undemocratic bourgeois public sphere and the

democracy of the irrational mass society might finally be reconciled.
But what I propose instead is to read Structural Transformation as the
sort of encounter between theory and history that offers a useful
counterweight to the drift into abstraction characteristic of more
recent critical theory. It is this kind of historically grounded attention
to the evolution of discourses, practices and institutions that, I
suggest, does more to energise and stimulate our thinking about
democracy than either a philosophically abstract preoccupation with

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