Page 82 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 77

recent Habermasian critical theory is located, it is not the dream of
communion that is at play but the hopes for a continual reworking or
carving out of sufficient fragments of a shared way of life or common

purpose to keep us deliberating, arguing and reaching compromises
about the ways in which we wish to live better together.
In fact, the Habermasian framework is not quite so far removed
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from Laclau and Mouffe’s influential model of ‘agonistic pluralism’,

which emphasises the ongoing struggles between competing cultural,
political and ethical discourses, as is widely assumed. This, despite
Laclau continuing to paint Habermas as the naïve universalist who
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pathologises dissensus. What in fact distinguishes Habermas’s
approach is not outright antipathy towards argumentation and
particularism but, rather, a stubborn insistence that, if we aspire to
see argumentation gain ascendancy over coercion in the public realm
(even where that very distinction remains a topic of debate), then it’s
necessary to engage in the tricky business of imagining democratic
norms which, though they could never operate in a cultural vacuum,
could reasonably motivate a diverse citizenry to favour argumentation
over ‘costlier’ alternatives.
This is the procedural bias in Habermas’s thinking: he emphasises
the task of developing constitutional structures that refl exively
aspire towards greater and greater inclusivity, autonomy from the
majoritarian or elitist traditions of established political cultures, and
the nourishment of a sufficiently concrete and motivating ethos of

democratic citizenship in pluralistic societies. Habermas develops a

term for this ethos which is sufficient to make the hairs on the back of
the neck stand up for anyone aspiring towards a progressive politics,
even those of a republican hue: the term he coins is ‘constitutional
patriotism’. It’s necessary first of all to identify some of the unfortunate

but ultimately misleading connotations of this concept before
we consider its real merits and pitfalls. The gendered etymology
of the term ‘patriotism’ (from the Latin patriota, meaning fellow
countryman, and the Greek patris, meaning fatherland) combines
unhappily with the contemporary associations of chauvinism and
the ethno-nationalist politics of the post-cold war world. But these
are precisely the connotations that Habermas is challenging us to
think beyond. Constitutional patriotism is one of those intriguing
oxymorons – rather like the idea of post-traditional traditions – that
invite us to think beyond established binaries. How can a sense of
psychological investment or of ‘feeling at home’ in a democratic
polity be uncoupled (which is not to say magically insulated) from

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