A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 126

Beschreibung

Jürgen Habermas's book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, first published in 1962, has long been recognized as one of the most important works of twentieth-century social thought. Blending philosophy and social history, it offered an account of the public sphere as a domain that mediates between civil society and the state in which citizens could discuss matters of common concern and participate in democratic decision-making through the formation of public opinion. Now, in view of the digital revolution and the resulting crisis of democracy, he returns to this important topic. In this new book Habermas focuses on digital media, in particular social media, which are increasingly relegating traditional mass media to the background. While the new media initially promised to empower users, this promise is being undermined by their algorithm-steered platform structure that promotes self-enclosed informational 'bubbles' and discursive 'echo chambers' in which users split into a plurality of pseudo-publics that are largely closed off from one other. Habermas argues that, without appropriate regulation of digital media, this new structural transformation is in danger of hollowing out the institutions through which democracies can shape social and economic processes and address urgent collective problems, ranging from growing social inequality to the climate crisis.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright Page

Preface

Notes

Reflections and Conjectures on a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Notes

Deliberative Democracy: An Interview

Notes

What Is Meant by ‘Deliberative Democracy’? Objections and Misunderstandings

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics

Jürgen Habermas

Translated by Ciaran Cronin

polity

Copyright Page

Originally published in German as Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin 2022. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2023

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5893-3

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5894-0 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934596

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

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Preface

I would like to thank my colleagues Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani, whose current work on whether we must speak of a ‘new’ structural transformation of the public sphere has prompted me to revisit an old topic, even though I have long since turned my attention to different questions and only take very selective note of the relevant publications. In return, the contributions they have collected in a special issue of the journal Leviathan, which has appeared in the meantime, have enabled me to get up to speed on the current state of the professional discussion.1 I would like thank all of the contributors for the instructive reading.

Not altogether surprisingly, the topic is attracting widespread interest today. Therefore, I have decided to make a slightly revised version of my own contribution to the aforementioned collection available to a more general audience. This essay is supplemented with two clarificatory texts on the concept of deliberative politics, which depends on enlightened democratic will formation in the political public sphere. These texts consist of an abridged version of an interview conducted for the Oxford Handbook on Deliberative Democracy2 and an adaptation of my foreword to a volume of interviews on the same topic edited by Emilie Prattico.3

Jürgen Habermas

Starnberg, January 2022

Notes

 1

  Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

(

Leviathan

, Special Issue 37) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2021). For English translations of selected contributions, see Seeliger and Sevignani (eds.), ‘Special Issue: A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere?’,

Theory, Culture & Society

39/4 (2022).

 2

  Jürgen Habermas, ‘Interview’, in André Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge and Mark E. Warren (eds.),

The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 871–82.

 3

  Jürgen Habermas, ‘Foreword’, in Emilie Prattico (ed.),

Habermas and the Crisis of Democracy: Interviews with Leading Thinkers

(London and New York: Routledge, 2022), xiii–xix.

Reflections and Conjectures on a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere1

As the author of the book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, originally published in German nearly six decades ago and chosen by Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani as the starting point for their edited collection of papers,2 I would like to make two remarks. Judging by sales, the book, although it was my first, has remained my most successful to date. The second remark concerns the reason that I suspect accounts for this unusual reception: the book contains a social and conceptual history of the ‘public sphere’ that attracted a great deal of criticism but also provided new stimuli for more wide-ranging historical research. This historical aspect is not my topic here. But for the social sciences, it had the effect of embedding the political concept of the ‘public sphere’ in a wider socio-structural context. Until then, the term had been used in a rather unspecific sense, primarily within the conceptual field of ‘public opinion’ understood since Lazarsfeld in demoscopic terms; by contrast, my study conceptualized the public sphere in sociological terms and assigned it a place within the functionally differentiated structure of modern societies between civil society and the political system. This meant that it could also be studied with a view to its functional contribution to social integration and, in particular, to the political integration of the citizens.3 I am aware that the social significance of the public sphere extends far beyond its contribution to democratic will formation in constitutional states;4 nevertheless, I also discussed it subsequently from the perspective of political theory.5 In the present text, too, I take as my starting point the function of the public sphere in ensuring the continued existence of the democratic political community.

I will begin by addressing the relationship between normative and empirical theory (1), before going on to explain why and how we should understand the democratic process, once it is institutionalized under social conditions marked by individualism and pluralism, in the light of deliberative politics (2), and concluding these preliminary theoretical reflections by recalling the improbable conditions that must be fulfilled if a crisis-prone capitalist democracy is to remain stable (3). Within this theoretical framework, for which StructuralTransformation provided a preliminary social-historical analysis, I will outline how digitalization is transforming the structure of the media and the impact that this transformation is having on the political process. The technological advance marked by digitalized communication initially fosters trends towards the dissolution of boundaries, but also towards the fragmentation of the public sphere. The platform character of the new media is creating, alongside the editorial public sphere, a space of communication in which readers, listeners and viewers can spontaneously assume the role of authors (4). The reach of the new media is shown by the findings of a longitudinal survey on the usage of the expanded media offerings in Germany. While internet usage has increased rapidly over the past two decades and both television and radio have been largely able to hold their ground, consumption of printed newspapers and magazines has plummeted (5). The rise of the new media is taking place in the shadow of the commercial exploitation of the currently virtually unregulated internet communication. On the one hand, this is threatening to undermine the economic basis of the traditional newspaper publishers and of journalists as the responsible occupational group; on the other hand, a mode of semi-public, fragmented and self-enclosed communication seems to be spreading among exclusive users of social media that is distorting their perception of the political public sphere as such. If this conjecture is correct, an important subjective prerequisite for a more or less deliberative mode of opinion and will formation is jeopardized among an increasing portion of the citizenry (6).

(1) In studies dealing with the role of the political public sphere in constitutional democracies, we generally distinguish between empirical investigations and normative theories – John Rawls speaks in this connection of ‘ideal theory’. This alternative involves an oversimplification. In my view, the role of democratic theory is to reconstruct the rational content of the norms and practices that have acquired positive validity since the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century and, as such, have become part of historical reality. The very fact that empirical studies of processes of opinion formation under democratic conditions become pointless if these studies are not also interpreted in the light of the normative requirements these processes are supposed to satisfy in constitutional democracies, highlights an interesting circumstance. However, understanding this calls for a brief historical digression. For the revolutionary acts that endowed basic rights with positive validity first made citizens aware of a new normative gradient [normatives Gefälle] that as a result became part of social reality itself.

The peculiarly demanding normativity of constitutional orders founded on basic rights is a function of their ‘unsaturated’ character, in virtue of which they point beyond the status quo. This historical fact can be better understood against the backdrop of the customary form of social normativity. Social phenomena, be they actions, flows of communication or artefacts, values or norms, habits or institutions, contracts or organizations, have a rule-governed character. This is shown by the possibility of deviant behaviour: rules can be followed or broken. Different kinds of rules exist: logical, mathematical and grammatical rules, game rules and instrumental and social rules of action, which can be differentiated according to strategic and normatively regulated interactions. It is the latter norms, in particular, that are distinguished by the peculiar mode of validity of the ‘ought’.6 As the nature of the sanctions for deviant behaviour shows, such normative behavioural expectations may make more or less strict demands, with morality imposing the most stringent demands. The distinguishing feature of the universalistic moral conceptions that arose with the worldviews of the axial age is that they call for the equal treatment of all persons in principle. In the course of the European Enlightenment, this moral-cognitive potential became detached from the respective religious or metaphysical background and was differentiated in such a way that – according to the still authoritative Kantian tenor – each person, in his or her inalienable individuality, ought to be accorded equal respect and receive equal treatment. On this conception, each person’s conduct must be judged, taking his or her individual situation into consideration, in accordance with precisely those general norms that are equally good for everyone from the discursively examined standpoint of all those possibly affected.

A particular sociological implication of this development is especially interesting in the present context. We must recall the singularly radical character of rational morality if we want to gauge the steep normative gradient of the oughtness claim [Fallhöhe des Sollensanspruchs] raised by this egalitarian-individualistic universalism. Moreover, switching perspective from rational morality to the rational law inspired by this morality, this radicalness is also essential for understanding the historical significance of the fact that, since the first two constitutional revolutions, this exacting moral-cognitive potential has formed the core of the basic rights sanctioned by the state, and thus of positive law in general. With the ‘declaration’ of the basic rights and human rights, the substance of rational morality migrated into the medium of binding constitutional law constructed out of subjective rights! With those historically unprecedented founding acts that give rise to democratic constitutional orders in the late eighteenth century, the hitherto unknown tension of a normative gradient lodged itself in the political consciousness of legally free and equal citizens. This encouragement to develop a new normative self-understanding went hand in hand with a new historical consciousness turned offensively towards the future, as Reinhard Koselleck has demonstrated. Taken as a whole, it amounted to a complex shift in consciousness embedded in the capitalist dynamics of a transformation of conditions of social life that is simultaneously accelerated by technological progress. In the meantime, however, this dynamic has provoked a more defensive mindset in Western societies, one which feels overwhelmed rather than energized by the technologically and economically propelled growth in societal complexity. But the enduring social movements that repeatedly reawaken the consciousness of the incomplete inclusion of oppressed, marginalized, degraded, afflicted, exploited and disadvantaged groups, classes, subcultures, genders, races, nations and continents, are a reminder of the gap between the positive validity and the still unsaturated content of the human rights that, in the meantime, have been ‘declared’ not only at the national level.7 Hence – and this is the point of my digression – among the preconditions of the survival of a democratic polity is that the citizens should see themselves from the participant perspective as being involved in the process of progressively realizing the basic rights, which, although they have not been exhausted, already enjoy positive validity.

Quite apart from these long-term processes through which the basic rights are realized, what interests me is the normal case in which the status of free and equal citizens in a democratically constituted polity is associated with certain taken-for-granted idealizations. For when the citizens participate in their civic practices, they cannot avoid making the intuitive (and counterfactual) assumption that the civil rights they practise generally deliver on what they promise. Especially with a view to the stability of the political system, the normative core of the democratic constitution must be anchored in civic consciousness, that is, in the citizens’ own implicit beliefs. It is not the philosophers, but the large majority of the citizens, who must be intuitively convinced of the constitutional principles. On the other hand, they must also have confidence that their votes count equally in democratic elections, that legislation and jurisdiction, the actions of government and the administration, are mostly above board, and that, as a general rule, there is a fair opportunity to revise dubious decisions. Even though these expectations are idealizations that the actual practice sometimes falls short of to a greater or lesser extent, they create social facts insofar as they are reflected in the citizens’ judgements and conduct. What