Page 81 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

76 Jürgen Habermas

leads us to imagine increasingly abstract constitutional norms that
aspire to include the hypothetical anyone; on the other hand, we
cannot conceive of those norms as too abstract, as to do so would be
to miss the ethical patterning that inevitably shapes their realisation
in practice (thus occluding questions of power), and it would mean
we aspired to norms so inclusive that they seemed to belong to
and therefore to motivate no one. To conceive of constitutional
norms (including human rights) as purely moral constructs is both
misleading and dangerous in that sense. Somewhere, there is a
missing term. For Habermas – in recent work, at least – the missing
term is ‘political culture’, a democratic Sittlichkeit, a dose of Hegelian
tincture to soothe the Kantian pains of abstraction. I want to outline
the basic trajectory of this move and summarise some of its virtues.
But I also want to argue for a more urgent missing term – people, to
put it most glibly – and to argue for bringing Habermasian critical
theory a little further back down to earth.
To begin with, we should restate a very fundamental premise of
Habermasian critical theory: communicative action doesn’t function
simply to reveal consensus or possibilities for compromise or even
the ultimate incommensurability of interests. It does not simply
explicate preformed private interests. Rather, its function is conceived
as productive and processual: it is deliberative. Discourse brings new
possibilities for self-understanding, reflection and adjustment: this

trajectory may be towards greater dissensus, rather than consensus,
of course (our world-views develop in negative as well as positive
relativity to the ‘Others’ we encounter). But discourse is neither a
billiard table nor a melting pot but something more akin to the
cultural air we breathe. Whilst Habermas has not found it necessary
(let alone desirable) to announce the death of the subject under the
impact of the linguistic turn, he accepts the view that we can only
know ourselves and others through the lens of discourse, both actual
and imagined. Deliberative models of democracy, such as Habermas’s,
do not foreground the hopes that public communication can initiate
a ‘meeting of minds’ in the sense John Durham Peters has imputed to
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the Western ‘dream of communication’. Instead, they foreground
hopes of establishing territory through public discourse which, in
all our differences and disagreements, we can occupy together in
order at least to continue arguing reasonably with each other. To
be sure, there are different visions of deliberative democracy which
place differing levels of burden on the democratic process. But
towards the minimalist or proceduralist end of the spectrum, where

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