Page 91 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

86 Jürgen Habermas

Habermas’s injunction to aspire to unconditional respect for our
neighbours – we must respect each other’s differences even as we try
to establish common grounds for dialogue.
But the bonds of solidarity that we seek in the public sphere may
at times be simultaneously thicker and thinner than Habermas’s
constitutional model implies: thicker because we often seek friendship
and familiarity, deep levels of trust, people to laugh with and get
angry with, people who we can engage in passionate argument – the
kinds of relations we develop with others because of who they are
and not despite who they are (a theme we discussed in Chapter 1);
but thinner precisely because the decentred citizen does not put all
her existential eggs into one basket, does not – perhaps could not
– be transparently self-identical in any given space. The totalising
and pessimistic prognosis is that citizens of a fragmented and
pluralistic society only find these thickened-out bonds of solidarity

within relatively closed family, friendship or cultural groups. But the
realities of a protest movement, an online discussion group, a web-log
community or a local self-help group often show this to be a partial
truth. Micro-public spheres are rarely free of visible exclusionary
or parochial characteristics. Yet frequently they do bring together
strange bedfellows, be it the anarchists and the elderly women joined
in protest against the building of a new highway, or the US and Iraqi

‘bloggers’ finding points of empathy and common interest whilst
their fundamental world-views remain poles apart. The decentred self
opens up possibilities for thickened, if more ad hoc and transient,
bonds of solidarity to develop between ‘Others’ than Habermas’s
rather dry model of constitutional patriotism allows for.
There is an irony here. Habermas is frequently criticised for
fetishising dialogue at the expense of one-way and mass mediated
communication (something I will take up the following chapter)
and for privileging the ideal of co-presence between citizens in the
guise of the ‘ideal speech situation’ at the expense of the scattered
‘imagined community’. And yet here is this champion of proximity
formulating a model – indeed, an ethic – of citizenship whose mantra
seems to be ‘keep your distance!’, lest the ‘integrity’ of the Other be
damaged; ‘include the Other’, might run the small print, ‘but do
not expect too much of her and do not give too much of yourself’.
In The Theory of Communicative Action Habermas drew heavily on
Lawrence Kohlberg’s idea of ‘post-conventional’ morality, which
privileges interaction between ‘generalised Others’ over that between
‘concrete Others’, something which Carol Gilligan had forcefully

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