1. Not surprisingly for somebody who maintains that modernity is an “incomplete project” and upholds the fallibility of modern scientific knowledge, Habermas’ thoughts about the future are inconclusive. Unlike his immediate predecessors, he believes that the process of cultural rationalisation has provided us with vital resources to continue the struggle for generalised enlightenment. Yet he admits that the prospects of this politico-cultural option are not good. He seems to think that the old compromise structures of the welfare state cannot deal with the new conflicts. It is clear that the old welfare state compromises between capitalism and democracy were a zero-sum game under challenge from both sides. The strategy of welfare interventionism placed too great a demand on political power to bring forth the new forms of life. Foucault and others have revealed the destructive normalising role of bureaucratic and legal norms. A solution requires the building of restraining barriers and sensors for the really effective exchange between system and lifeworld. The need to protect highly rationalised lifeworlds from intolerable systems imperative poses the problem of limits. We cannot rely on these autonomous subsystems learning to function better. What is required is a new division of powers within societal integration that allows social solidarity to assert itself against these functional systems. As we have seen, Habermas has always put great emphasis on the public sphere as a realm of inter-subjective cultural and political dialogue regarding common issues. In the new context he sees the emergence of new autonomous public spheres out of everyday practice. He sees this as a means of consolidating higher level subjectivities and promoting self-organisation of citizens. This facilitates what he considers as a sharpened view of the political. The public sphere must act as a means whereby modern complex societies can gain a normative distance from themselves and work out experiences of crisis collectively. However, this model is clearly not without problems. The idea of spontaneously emerging public spheres presupposes a sort of grassroots organisation and discussion generated out of the lifeworld. However once this local solidarity crosses this threshold of organization, it then develops into full organisations with their own independent system imperatives. However, to leave things here would be to accept a model of imbalance between systems and lifeworld that reproduces the current bias in favour of systems.
2. Habermas attempted to address this problem in his major work in political philosophy Between Facts and Norms (1996). There he analyses the complex set of interdependencies that govern the relations between informal processes of collective opinion and will formation and the administrative and decision-making functions of the political centre. On this account, the informal public sphere does not appear in the first instance as a set of institutions but as a ‘network for communicating information and points of view’. It describes processes whereby problems, formerly encountered privately, are attached to reasons through which their generalising significance can be recognised. In pursuit of its ambition to facilitate the shift of expressions of private dissatisfaction into the terms of effective claims, public spheres must be ‘anchored in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns of political culture and socialisation.’ Habermas’ account of the informal public sphere describes the democratising potentials of this process of communicative rationality where legitimacy is generated via processes of argumentation. These finally appeal, not to the authority of tradition or power but to a set of consensually elaborated principles. The presumption of the rationality of this mode of interaction confers legitimacy on a democratising mode of interaction that takes shape within civil society. At this stage, however, the public sphere is not a formalised discourse of law but a generalized mechanism of “bundling” where streams of communication are filtered and synthesized into topically specified public opinions. The achievement of the public sphere is, on the one hand, measured in terms of the increased self-understanding and extended mutual understanding discovered by its participants. At the same time, this process of self-clarification finally permits the newly ‘bundled’ problems to seek patronage within the decision-making bodies of a constitutional democracy.
3. Habermas understanding of the role of the administrative institutions of liberal democracy attempts to synthesize the lessons of both the republican and liberal models. On the one hand the republican tradition is criticised for neglecting the theorisation of administrative power and expelling it from the domain of real politics as the ‘rule of nobody’. On the other hand, he argues that a liberal understanding of administration, that is focused primarily on rational outcomes, pacifies the citizen and fails to recognise the extent to which his or her own self-awareness of issues is a decisive ingredient in meeting real political needs.
4. Habermas offers a proceduralist interpretation of the role of the administrative state in democratic processes. It serves as model for democratising administrative power and confronting some of the deepest problems that have plagued the welfare state. His main idea is that the “bluntness” of law and administration as policy instruments in the fraught domains of welfare (epitomised by the phenomenon of juridification) can be best counter-acted by alternative arrangements. Democratic forums and enclaves must be devised and introduced within administrative arrangements wherever possible as a vehicle whereby clients are allowed to become citizens who articulate their own needs and interests. However, this reformist agenda in the domain of administration is only one instantiation of Habermas’ desire to conceptually spell out the normative meaning of contemporary liberal democracy. This is not to say that he ignores problems. The later chapters of Between Facts and Norms lay out the way in which money and power present real obstacles to the complete delivery of the normative content of liberal democratic arrangements. However, as we have seen, Habermas is convinced that the institutional realization of this normative vision of liberal democracy is itself a singular historical achievement. And this is not simply a laudatio of the past. He is also sure that this normative content acts as a vital and powerful counterfactual ideal that is something that can and must be built on.
5. Despite his assessment that in modernity the fragile project of democracy is everywhere on the defensive and the chances of moving in the right direction are not good, Habermas has become even more critical of his Marxist inheritance. By the time of the third German edition of The Theory of Communicative Action(1993) he is at pains to further distance himself from the theory of reification that had provided the conceptual basis of the colonisation thesis. He now suggests that in a theory meant to underline the ambiguous potentiality of modernity, it was a mistake to allow the concept of colonisation the central position. This conceptual preference seemed to decide the question of the dynamic between system and lifeworld in a predetermined way in favour of the former. On these grounds, he abandons the concept of colonisation. Not because he is no longer concerned about the real and potential encroachments of the systems and purposive rationality into the lifeworld but because he wants to view the nexus between the two as a two-way street with flows going in both directions. The question of which side imposes itself is ultimately an empirical question that cannot be decided in advance.
6. In the last two decades Habermas’ political thought has concentrated on the crisis of the welfare state with the emerging forces of globalisation This describes a “process not an end state” characterised by the “increasing scope and intensity of commercial, communicative and exchange relations beyond national borders”. While these tendencies run in many dimensions, the most dominant one has been economic globalisation. Here Habermas sees the re-emergence of an old problem. This concerns the difficulty of exploiting the effective functioning of the market without having to bear such great social costs that they eventually endanger the integration of liberal democratic societies. The democratic goal of the welfare state is to secure the social, technological and ecological conditions that make the equal opportunity for the use of equally distributed basic rights possible. This goal is now put out of reach by an economic globalisation that undermines the capacity of the nation state to prosecute its program. Capital mobility and ecological degradation across porous state borders are just two of the main indexes of the nation-states loss of sovereignty in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Capital mobility has been especially telling on the capacity of the state to fund extensive welfare programs. Fiscal pressures all over the OECD countries resulted from tax-cuts in the attempt to stem capital flight. This has inevitably led to the slimming down of the state and drastic reductions in welfare expenditure in response to sinking corporate tax revenues.
7. For Habermas, one of the main paradoxes of globalisation is the fact that it “forces the nation-state to open itself up internally to the multiplicity of foreign, or new forms of cultural life” while, at the same time, “shrinking the scope of action for national governments. He adopts the metaphor of “opening” and “closing” to reinforce his point. He argues that European history since the Middle Ages has seen an unparalleled the opening up of traditional lifeworlds. As much as communities and lifeworlds profit from opening up to their environments, it is, Habermas argues, also essential that they be able to regulate this dynamism by various degrees of “closure.” Closure is vital because “the spatial and temporal horizons always form a whole that is both intuitively present and always withdrawn to an unproblematic background”. This provides lifeworld participants with a perspective of competence that contains every possible interaction. It is vital for both the community and the individual to absorb new impulses and loosen ascriptive ties of family, locality, social background and tradition so they can reorganise these relations. The happiest periods of European history have been those when some sort of equilibrium has been maintained between “opening” and “closing”. On this basis, he wants to argue that there is a dilemma facing both neo-liberalism and post-modernism alike. They cannot explain how the deficits in steering competencies and legitimation that have emerged at the national level as a result of such “opening” by economic globalisation can be compensated at the super-national level without some form of “closure” in the sense of political regulation.
8. It is in line with this comprehensive understanding of globalisation and in particular the pressure that its economic dimension has put on both the welfare state and its nation-state bearer, that Habermas poses the task of needing to supply democracy with some sort of post-national dimension. This would create supra-nation state political structures able to restore balance between the existing global economic networks and inchoate mechanisms of political closure. The movement towards some sort of supra-national institutions of co-operation and regulation are already evident in new economic and trading arrangements like NAFTA, EU and AESEAN. This is all part of a movement in which the political attempts to catch up with the economic. The limitation of these developments is that they do not change the overall context of the global economic competition but only amount to defensive trading adaptations. In Habermas’ view a meaningful (although to this time almost utopian) alternative would be to hand over most of the main regulative functions of the national welfare state to supra-national structures and authorities. The European Union has some potential in this direction. But as we have seen recently, there is also significant internal popular resistance to these developments especially when European populations feel that their life conditions may be eroded. At the moment the European Union stands before the question of whether it can make the jump from a union of economic relations and markets with weak and indirect political regulation to a new federated political structure. But Habermas insisted that this will not simply be the result of constitutional developments. The conditions for such a political entity depend upon the creation of solidarity at the base. It requires that all citizens of the Union be included in the creation of a unified political culture. Solidarity at the base requires democratic processes at the local level that have taken root. This will requires a synchronised debate across Europe on its future fostered by national political parties with the assistance of education systems fostering foreign languages. The goal would be to establish a polyglot communicative context by interlinking national public spheres and developing both common interests and a European civil society.
9. Clearly the obstacles to such a development seem formidable. All projects to further develop unifying procedures and practices face the reality of vested national interests and asymmetrical inter-dependence. This means that national global actors still prefer to externalise social costs and are generally reluctant to act even in the face of obvious global interests. However, Habermas argues that the national consciousness of the 19th century was only gradually produced. His own understanding of globalisation as a “process” involving not just the increasing scope and intensity of commercial but also of communicative relations holds further promise. We are now witnesses to a changing awareness of planetary interdependence and risk. Whether or not this will lead to a changed consciousness of citizens in a way that brings about cosmopolitan solidarity is impossible to say. What Habermas has in mind here is not just a fuzzy feeling of shared humanity but an actual preparedness to see policies implemented that successfully redistribute burdens. Yet Habermas argues that this cosmopolitan solidarity could be weaker than the bonds we typically associate with civil society. He is not a proponent of world government. Any realistic supra-national political framework must take into account the autonomy and differences of the existing sovereign national states. A move in this direction will be possible when electorates are prepared to reward political elites for decisions that demonstrate a concern for global governance. At the moment, the chances for this are reduced by the defensive reactions of middle and working class electorates that fear their prospects in a harsher globalised environment. Habermas sees the best hope for this in the pressures that can be exerted by interest groups, NGO’s and civilly active citizens. For him, the prospects for democracy in our time now rest beyond the nation-state. In this new global constellation the best that a national government can do is fight a losing rear guard action trying to hold of the irresistible powers of economic globalisation.
10. We have already touched on some problems with Habermas' contemporary prognosis. Another range of problems can be couched as objections and touch on various levels on Habermas' theoretical construction. The first level concerns the empirical adequacy of the theory. Remember that the fundamental motivation behind his reconceptualisation of modernity in terms of lifeworld and system lay in his belief that the welfare state compromise faced new challenges coming from new social movements and a post-materialist politics. Habermas's notion of the colonisation of the lifeworld was constructed especially to account for these challenges. However, while this model does appear in its focus on the client and the consumer to capture important aspects of the new situation, there are also some glaring holes. Perhaps the most significant problem in advanced Western societies is the issue of structural unemployment. Yet Habermas's model of a post-materialist reflective politics seems to largely depend upon conditions of relative full employment like those that operated in Germany up to the end of the eighties.
11. Objections can also be raised at the level of conceptualisation. Habermas' model views the lifeworld and system as two autonomous and complementary spheres of action. In conceptualisation of the system he presupposes a norm free organisation of action along purely functional lines. Likewise he views the lifeworld as sphere of communicative action where the integration is achieved by linguistic means orientated to mutual understanding. While Habermas does not consider this domain power free, he does at least seem to think that here domination is on the evolutionary decline. Some critics have argued that both of these conceptions are fictions. The idea of the system organised solely according to principles of purposive rationality commits a double error. It presupposes that the organisation of the economy and the administration of the state are the embodiment of purposive rational rules and that action within these domains take place independent of the formation of normative consensus. The first proposition seems contradicted by the fact economic organisations and bureaucratic administrations are the embodiment not only of purposive rational but also political-practical principles. Such political-practical principles are nothing else but the outcome of a continuous process of communication and bargaining of interests amongst concerned actors. Thus neither management nor administration carries out tasks completely independently from the normative agreement of members. Similarly, critics have also questioned the power free status of the communicatively orientated lifeworld on the grounds that the family and the public sphere are hardly bereft of power relations. Habermas is perhaps optimistic to view their presence as simply the residue of traditionalism soon to be dissolved by the enlightenment of evolutionary learning processes. But in his defense it should be noted that for him distortion-free communication is a counter-factual normative ideal rather than the reality. However, this still leaves his analysis of linguistic pragmatics open to the criticism that is neglects the role of a whole range of non-economic and non-bureaucratic power plays.
12. Even sympathetic commentators have also questioned the “uncritical” character of his reading of liberal democratic institutional arrangements in Between Facts and Norms. This representative complaint is expressed well by William Scheuerman. He maintains that this ‘at times surprisingly moderate and even conciliatory picture’ fails ‘to give adequate expression to legitimate unease and anxiety about ‘really existing” democracy’. Of course, this charge would come as no surprise to those familiar with the historical reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. Habermas here commits crimes that radical critics like Marx and the other Left Hegelians long ago placed at Hegel’s door. Those who were here in first semester will remember that Hegel’s own “reconciliation with reality” was ultimately bought at significant political and philosophical cost. His doubts regarding democracy and his philosophical retreat to a retrospective contemplation that “paints its grey in grey and cannot change the world” are only too well known. Habermas has learnt this Hegelian lesson well. While he acknowledges the importance of utopian images and the energies that motivate social movements, he agrees with Hegel that a responsible philosophy cannot be reduced to mere subjective fancy. What Habermas provides in the middle chapters of Between Facts and Norms is a philosophical reconstruction of the main normative elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Philosophy still has a vital contemporary critical task to perform, of translation between modern cultural and institutional achievement and the everyday, of critical self-reflection. The spirit of modernity has already set before us a challenging task that is still incomplete. The constitutional principles of liberal democracy demand a synthesis of private and public autonomy that takes us to a democratic horizon that is still to be realised and may ultimately never be attain. Yet, for him, this is the contemporary “rationality of the real” that we abandon only at our peril. Here is a combination of philosophical restraint and cultural optimism, of ambition and limitation that, while it may stray from the letter is very much in accord with the spirit of Hegel.
13. This leads to the most abstract level of Habermas’ theorisation. Earlier I mentioned Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modern philosophy had shifted focus from substantive rationality to the formal conditions of rationality. While this is taken as the starting point of his own theory of communicative action, it is clear that this theory is guided by the idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? If we are to ask Foucault what is the normative standpoint of his critique of modernity, we must require Habermas to do the same. It seems clear that this underlying but orientating concept echoes past substantive concepts of reason like those embodied in the Marxian notion of socialism and the Hegelian concept of spirit. Yet, Habermas repudiates teleology as a return to discredited notions of the philosophy of history. His alternative is to view his own standpoint in a quasi-Hegelian fashion as the outcome of the evolutionary historical processes of cultural rationalisation. This process has no concrete bearer in the sense of Hegel's spirit or Marx's proletariat because for Habermas its theoretical status is that of a reconstructive philosophical hypothesis that is dependent upon the support of the full range of social sciences. However our access to this hypothetical universal is to traverse a la Hegel the story of human cultural evolution that Habermas lays out in The Theory of Communicative Action. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language. In following the historical process of cultural differentiation we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent in language. The illocutionary validity claims are implicit in the various potential speaker/ listener and observer roles and their accompanying validity claims allowed us as communicative actors. For Habermas this claim gives his theory a neo-transcendental foundation and is a defensible theoretical hypothesis, while critics might argue that it is a disguised return to a no longer tenable substantive notion of reason.
14. A crucial element of Habermas movement beyond teleology and concrete historical actors has been his embrace of the category of “universalisability”. This is the concomitant of a theory that has placed abstract humanity in the position once occupied by the proletariat. However, the category of “universalisability” does not provide criteria for moving from this description of the whole of society to a critique of its oppressive parts. It is incapable of dealing with intractable material interests. The category of universalisability works effectively when the issue is grounding specific rationalities. However it is incapable of specifying priorities amongst competing general concerns, material interest and confronting organisation questions. These are substantive and political questions. This is especially the case when the issues are economic inequality and intractable power differentials. Furthermore, the social effectivity of discourse ethics depends not on insight into the rules of linguistic competence but on a commitment to put them into practice. The problem of the “free loader” familiar to proponents of rational choice theory remains unaddressed by Habermas’ assurances of the counterfactual status of the ethics of communicative action. We are also well aware that the constitutional machinery of the liberal democratic state regularly produces real inequalities of outcome despite the existence of formally equal treatment before the courts and other arenas of political and social compromise. This fact suggests that an immanently critical theory to which Habermas aspires must aspire to go beyond the formalism of the general values of our society and track the substance of their realisation. A critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference like those that issue from Habermas’ Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.
15. Habermas’ theoretical achievement is unquestionable. He has relentlessly pursued the quest to grasp contemporary society as an integral and dynamic totality with potentials both of emancipation and threat. Against the strictures of the post-modernists, he has never lost sight of the necessity of compelling cultural meta-narratives. His theory of communicative action is a towering attempt to bring this practical cultural necessity into accord with a interdisciplinary program of philosophy and the human sciences and preserve a utopian moment duly constrained by immanence and political responsibility. Not even his harshest critics have been able to offer an alternative to his prerequisites for communicative action. This makes him a worthy successor in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and critical theory. Yet, it is questionable whether a conceptual instrumentarium drawn primarily from linguistic philosophy and functional sociology has all the equipment needed to address the problems mentioned above, preserve a comprehensive critical edge. This requires all the means of conceptualising not just the general dynamics of cultural learning processes and their instantiated validity claims but also the concrete dynamics of contemporary social reality and the historically determinant quality of events. The magnitude of Habermas’ own contribution towards such a theory cannot disguise the fact that a great deal more needs to be done. However such a conclusion is very much in accord with Habermas’ own understanding of modernity as ongoing and perennially incomplete project.
