Page 90 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 85

certainly be Habermas’s own location in post-unifi cation Germany
demanding urgent debate on constitutional reform. One could also
argue that the urgency of questions surrounding the role of law and
the constitution within progressive politics has perhaps been obscured
amid the social-scientific focus on globalisation as economic, political

and cultural entropy: in that context, a reminder of the need to
rethink the role of law and constitutionalism in a more nuanced way
in order to address problems of justice and cultural recognition in an
increasingly complex world may be a healthy antidote.
But taken on its own, Habermas’s recent work retains a serious
blind spot. This can only be addressed if critical theory pays attention
to the question of whether micro-public spheres can overcome their
parochialism in ways which are not necessarily centre-oriented. Where
there is no centre as such, only differential clusterings of power, it
makes no sense to pathologise or neglect those zones of discourse and
activity that target one such nodal point at the expense of another. To
reiterate, this is not to buy into the rather shortsighted anti-statism of
some current protest movements and anarchistic subcultures, where
the state is often dismissed not only as a potential force for good, but
also as a minor player – a mere conduit for corporate power – in the
world’s ills. But not all roads do or should lead to the state – it is not
the vanishing point of the dialectic of justice and solidarity, which
is what we are in danger of gleaning from Habermas’s later work, at
least when we read it in isolation from his earlier writings. There are
problems of justice and solidarity that implicate the constitutional
state, but there are many zones of society in which advances in both
can and must be pursued elsewhere. In its centring and privileging
of the constitutional state, Habermas’s particular batch of Hegelian
tincture seems decidedly past its ‘use by’.
One of the constraints Habermas places on his own recent critical
theory is an exclusive concern with the problem of solidarity and justice
between ‘strangers’, that is, people who wish to remain strangers but
who seek common ground with the ‘Others’ to whom they are linked
into networks of fate. There is a sense in which globalisation lends this
project greater and greater urgency as we come to acknowledge the
complex networks of interconnection that, regardless of our choosing,
implicate us in expanding networks of difference. At the same time,
this is a one-dimensional formulation. Solidarity and strangerdom
are large and complex lands. For, as citizens, we tolerate and, at
times, even crave different levels of proximity to our ‘neighbours’.
To be ‘good’ citizens in a pluralistic world, we certainly must follow

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