Page 86 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 81

recognition of their members; it does not represent a kind of preservation
of species by administrative means … Cultural heritages and the forms of
life articulated within them normally reproduce themselves by convincing
those whose personality structures they shape, that is, by motivating them
to appropriate and continue the traditions productively … For to guarantee
survival would be to rob members of the freedom to say yes or no. 73

Habermas argues for a ‘politics of recognition’ in the public sphere
that addresses the shortcomings of both liberal individualism and the
well-intentioned multiculturalist politics of equality by emphasising

a more inclusive and reflexive ‘dialectic of legal and factual equality’
embedded in a political culture that ‘belongs’ equally to those affected
by it:

Moral universalism must not take into account the aspect of equality … at
the expense of the aspect of individuality … The equal respect for everyone
else demanded by a moral universalism sensitive to difference thus takes
the form of a nonleveling and nonappropriating inclusion of the other in his
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otherness.
The ‘politics of recognition’ is an ethic of rebuilding public cultures of
citizenship scaffolded by institutional structures and legal guarantees
that enable all citizens to feel included and, should they wish, to
become involved in the authorship of those institutions and laws. Its
undoubted merit is the way it orients our thinking beyond various
dominant discourses of public culture in today’s liberal democracies.
These include: a politics of polite tolerance which grants ‘difference’
a space of its own – some special seats in parliament, some cultural
funding or some guaranteed media exposure, for example – but little
positive role in the constitution of the ‘mainstream’; the benevolent
but paternalistic invitation to people from ‘other cultures’ (usually
an essentialist or reductive conception) to be admitted into ‘our’
prefabricated community of citizens; and the related, unrefl ective
claim that ‘our’ political culture is indifferent to cultural background,
that ‘anyone’ can potentially feel at home in it, and that to open it
up to new cultural infl uences – new ways of doing things – would be
to negate this neutrality. For Habermas, it’s important that a political
culture of ‘equal respect’ should not be conditional on the value
that the dominant culture places upon other cultures: ‘the right of
equal respect has nothing to do with the presumed excellence of
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his or her culture of origin’. The development of a ‘constitutional

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