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

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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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

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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.

Notes

 1

  An earlier version of this chapter was published as Jürgen Habermas, ‘Reflections and Hypotheses on a Further Structural Transformation of the Political Public Sphere’,

Theory, Culture & Society

39/4 (2022): 145–71.

 2

  Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

(

Leviathan

, Special Issue 37) (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2021). See Habermas,

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); originally published as:

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft

(Neuwied: Luchterhand and Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1962).

 3

  Bernhard Peters,

Die Integration moderner Gesellschaften

(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), and Peters, ‘On Public Deliberation and Public Culture: Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Hartmut Wessler (ed.),

Public Deliberation and Public Culture: The Writings of Bernhard Peters, 1993–2005

(London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 134–59; from this perspective, see also Hartmut Wessler,

Habermas and the Media

(Cambridge: Polity, 2018).

 4

  On the relationship between the political and literary public spheres, see my sidelong glance in Habermas, ‘Warum nicht lesen?’, in Katharina Raabe and Frank Wagner (eds.),

Warum Lesen – mindestens 24 Gründe

(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), pp. 99–123.

 5

  The chapter on the role of civil society and the political public sphere in

Between Facts and Norms

– Habermas,

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 329–87 – takes up the reflections in the concluding chapter of

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

, and especially in the introduction to the new 1990 edition of

Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit

: Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.),

Habermas and the Public Sphere

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 421–61. For more recent reflections on the topic, see Habermas, ‘Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Have an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research’, in

Europe: The Faltering Project

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 138–83.

 6

  Usually, however, sociological theories choose a basic conceptual approach that leaves the cognitive meaning of this dimension of validity out of account and attributes the binding effect of ought-validity [

Sollgeltung

] to the threat of sanctions.

 7

  The text of the French Constitution of September 1791 opens with a catalogue that distinguishes between

droits naturels

and

droits civils

. In this way, it took into account the temporal discrepancy between the current domain of validity of the general civil rights and the as yet unrealized claim to validity, which extends far beyond the territorial boundaries of the French state, of the ‘natural’ rights to which all persons have an equal claim in virtue of their humanity. Paradoxically, however, the human and civil rights enshrined as basic rights preserve the meaning of universal rights within national borders as well. In this way, they remind the present and future generations, if not of a self-obligation to actively propagate these rights, then at least of the peculiar character of the

context-transcending normative

content of universal human rights beyond the provisionality of their

at present

territorially restricted implementation. The moral surplus also leaves traces of an as yet unexhausted normative content in the existing basic rights, which exhibit something of the troubling character of an

unsaturated

norm. The lack of ‘saturation’ concerns the

temporal

dimension of the

exhaustion

– which, in the political community, is still pending and whose content still needs to be specified – of the indeterminate, context-transcending substance of established basic rights, as well as the

spatial

dimension of a

worldwide

implementation of human rights that remains to be accomplished.

 8

  See Daniel Gaus, ‘Rational Reconstruction as a Method of Political Theory between Social Critique and Empirical Political Science’,

Constellations

20/4 (2013): 553–70.

 9

  See ‘Interview with Jürgen Habermas’, in André Bächtiger et al. (eds.),

The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy

, pp. 871–82.

10

 On this, see Habermas, ‘Political Communication in Media Society’. See also Habermas, ‘On the Internal Relation between the Rule of Law and Democracy’,

European Journal of Philosophy

3/1 (1995): 12–20.

11

Vormärz

(lit. ‘pre-March’) refers to the period of revolutionary uprisings across the German states, and Europe in general, prior to March 1848, when a constituent assembly was convened in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. The resulting attempt to establish a liberal democratic national constitution in the German states foundered in the following year on monarchist resistance and dwindling popular support. [

Trans.

]

12

 Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani specify this role in terms of the transparency of public issues, the general orientation of citizens and the reciprocal justification of topics and contributions. See Seeliger and Sevignani, ‘A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? An Introduction’,

Theory, Culture & Society

39/4 (2022): 3–16, here p. 11.

13

 Normatively speaking, the so-called output legitimacy of government action that keeps citizens happy does not meet the conditions of democratically legitimate action; for although such services of the state coincide with citizens’ interests, they do not satisfy their interests

by executing a democratically formed will

of the citizens themselves.

14

 See my review of Cristina Lafont: Habermas, ‘Commentary on Cristina Lafont,

Democracy Without Shortcuts

’,

Journal of Deliberative Democracy

16/2 (2020): 10–14.

15

 Article 20 para. 2 of the Basic Law, the German federal constitution, declares that ‘All state authority is derived from the people.’ [

Trans

.]

16

 See Rainer Forst,

Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

17

 On the political concept of solidarity, see Habermas,

The Lure of Technocracy

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), pp. 98–100.

18

 See Armin Schäfer,

Der Verlust politischer Gleichheit

(Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015).

19

 See Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn,

Die demokratische Regression

(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2021).

20

 The phenomenon of contemporary right-wing populism illustrates how, in reasonably stable democracies, the steep

normative gradient

between the idea of deliberative politics, on the one hand, and the sobering reality of opinion and will formation, on the other, is anchored in social reality itself

through the intuitions of the citizens

. Empirical studies on voting behaviour, the level of information and political awareness of the population, political parties’ professional election advertising, public relations, campaign strategies, etc., have long since enabled us to form a realistic picture of political opinion and will formation; but neither these facts themselves nor knowledge of them normally shake the assumption of the active and passive electorate that the ‘will of the voters’, whether one agrees with the outcome or not, is sufficiently respected and sets the agenda for future policies. As the derogatory references to the established political parties in current German political discourse as ‘system parties’ shows, however, even such

forbearing

normative assumptions can become inverted into their opposite once confidence in them among the population at large is enduringly shaken. Then ‘we’ are the people which knows what is true and what is false, while a bridge cannot be constructed to the ‘others’ even with arguments.

21

 In contemporary German public discourse, ‘the disconnected’ [

die Abgehängten

] refers to groups of citizens who for various reasons feel disconnected from the political process or abandoned by the mainstream political parties and, in recent years, have tended to identify with or actively support mainly right-wing opposition movements (such as those that rallied against the public measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic) and political parties (in particular, the Alternative for Germany). [

Trans

.]

22

 See Philipp Staab and Thorsten Thiel, ‘Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’,

Theory, Culture & Society

39/4 (2022): 129–43.

23

 See Habermas,

The Crisis of the European Union

, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

24

 See Michael Zürn, ‘Öffentlichkeit und Global Governance’, in Seeliger and Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

, pp. 160–87.

25

 Jürg Steiner, André Bächtiger, Markus Spörndli and Marco R. Steenbergen,

Deliberative Politics in Action

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

26

 The global expansion of accelerated and multiplied communication flows leads Claudia Ritzi to suggest that, rather than the image of the centre and periphery, ‘the concept of the “universe” is a better metaphor for describing contemporary political publics. It creates an awareness of the unboundedness of the contemporary public space.’ See Ritzi, ‘Libration im Öffentlichkeitsuniversum’, in Seeliger and Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

, pp. 298–319, here p. 305.

27

 See Sebastian Sevignani, ‘Digital Transformations and the Ideological Formation of the Public Sphere: Hegemonic, Populist, or Popular Communication?’,

Theory, Culture & Society

39/4 (2022): 91–109.

28

 In what follows, I am relying on my correspondence with – and on the interpretive proposals of – Jürgen Gerhards, who drew my attention to the results of the ARD/ZDF long-term study on mass communication between 1964 and 2020. The autumn 2019 Eurobarometer also provides data that permit further conclusions.

29

 See Shoshana Zuboff,

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

(New York: Public Affairs, 2018).

30

 See Christian Fuchs, ‘Soziale Medien und Öffentlichkeit’, in Fuchs,

Das digitale Kapital: Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie des 21. Jahrhunderts

(Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2021), 235–72.

31

 Otfried Jarren and Renate Fischer, ‘Die Plattformisierung von Öffentlichkeit und der Relevanzverlust des Journalismus als demokratische Herausforderung’, in Seeliger and Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

, pp. 365–84.

32

 Ibid., p. 370.

33

 See Staab and Thiel, ‘Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’; Andreas Reckwitz,

The Society of Singularities

, trans. Valentine A. Pakis (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

34

 A consistent exception to this is, of course, literary correspondence, which – as the pertinent example of the Romantics demonstrates – satisfies aesthetic standards and thus also a public interest.

35

 Regrettably, here I cannot address the more far-reaching reflections of Hans-Jörg Trenz, ‘Öffentlichkeitstheorie als Erkenntnistheorie moderner Gesellschaft’, in Seeliger and Sevignani (eds.),

Ein erneuter Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit?

, pp. 385–405.

36

 See W. Lance Bennett and Barbara Pfetsch, ‘Rethinking Political Communication in a Time of Disrupted Public Spheres’,

Journal of Communication

68/2 (2018): 243–53.

37

 See also the vivid presentation in Andreas Barthelmes,

Die große Zerstörung: Was der digitale Bruch mit unserem Leben macht

(Berlin: Duden, 2020), esp. Ch. 7, pp. 128–55.

38

 This ‘semi-public sphere’ can be described equally well as a semi-privatized public sphere; Philipp Staab and Thorsten Thiel capture this character when they speak of ‘privatisation without privatism’. See Staab and Thiel, ‘Social Media and the Digital Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere’, p. 140.

39

 Romy Jaster and David Lanius, ‘Fake News in Politik und Öffentlichkeit’, in Ralf Hohlfeld, Michael Harnischmacher, Elfi Heinke, Lea Lehner and Michael Sengl (eds.),

Fake News und Desinformation

(Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2020), pp. 245–69.

40

 On Trump and fake news, see Michael Oswald, ‘Der Begriff “Fake News” als rhetorisches Mittel des Framings in der politischen Kommunikation’, in Hohlfeld et al. (eds.),

Fake News und Desinformation

, pp. 61–82.

41

 See Ralf Hohlfeld, ‘Die Post-Truth-Ära: Kommunikation im Zeitalter von gefühlten Wahrheiten und Alternativen Fakten’, in Hohlfeld et al. (eds.),

Fake News und Desinformation

, pp. 43–60.

42

 For a plausible statement of the position, see Sebastian Berg, Niklas Rakowski and Thorsten Thiel,

The Digital Constellation

(Weizenbaum Series, 14) (Berlin: Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society – The German Internet Institute, 2020); available at:

https://doi.org/10.34669/wi.ws/14

(last accessed 15.03.2023).

43

 Anyone who understands this connection will recognize the ultimately authoritarian character, directed against the foundations of a discursive public sphere, of the contemporary rampant criticism of the facilities and programme scope of the public broadcasters. Together with the quality press, which will probably soon also require public support to ensure its economic viability, the television and radio broadcasters are for the time being resisting the pull of a ‘platformization’ of the public sphere and a commodification of public consciousness. On this, see Fuchs, ‘Soziale Medien und Öffentlichkeit’.