0415367697.Routledge.HABERMAS.May.2006.pdf

Habermas

If we are to believe what many sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a

near-terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the

general significance of needs and problems seems to be collapsing. These cultural

potentials appear endangered from a variety of quarters: from the neo-liberal attempt to

universalize the norms of the market and interpret democracy as another form of

consumerism to the most recent efforts of the security state to constrain civil liberties in

the face of terrorism. For the past four decades the public sphere has been at the top of

Jürgen Habermas’ theoretical agenda. He has explored the historical meaning of the

concept, reconstructed its philosophical foundations in communication and repeatedly

diagnosed its ongoing crises. In the contemporary climate, a systematic look at Habermas’

lifelong project of rescuing the modern public sphere seems an urgent task.

This study explores the major episodes in Habermas’ thinking about the public sphere.

From the outset, he has maintained that the complex ambiguity of the Enlightenment,

its cultural achievements and potentials have been poorly understood. Whereas his first

major work tried to retrieve this ambiguity by excavating the neglected public-democratic

core of Enlightenment liberalism, his later writings attempted to provide this cultural

potential with a more secure anthropological basis in the pragmatics of communication.

In the early 1990s, Habermas suggested that the modern public sphere is still central to

the normative heart of liberal democratic constitutionalism and that we can learn from

the traumatic histories and partial successes of the democratic nation states what needs to

be done to build democracy with a post-national, cosmopolitan reach. In more recent times

he has shown the contemporary urgency of these ideas in a variety of public debates over

globalization, terrorism, the Iraq War and contemporary American foreign policy.

Habermas’ project of re-animating the significance of the public sphere and rescuing

the neglected potentials of Enlightenment legacies has been deeply controversial. For

many, it is too lacking in radical commitments to warrant its claim to a contemporary

place within a critical theory tradition. Against this charge, Pauline Johnson defends

Habermas’ utopian credentials while simultaneously arguing that his own construction of

contemporary emancipatory hopes is too narrow and one-sided.

Pauline Johnson teaches in the Sociology Department at Macquarie University, Sydney.

She has published widely on topics in contemporary critical theory and feminist theory.

Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought

1 Hayek and After

Hayekian liberalism as a

research programme

Jeremy Shearmur

8 Max Weber and

Michel Foucault

Parallel life works

Arpad Szakolczai

2 Conflicts in Social Science

Edited by Anton van Harskamp

9 The Political Economy of

Civil Society and

Human Rights

G. B. Madison

3 Political Thought of

André Gorz

Adrian Little

10 On Durkheim’s Elementary

Forms of Religious Life

Edited by W. S. F. Pickering,

W. Watts Miller and

N. J. Allen

4 Corruption, Capitalism and

Democracy

John Girling

5 Freedom and Culture in

Western Society

Hans Blokland

11 Classical Individualism

The supreme importance of each

human being

Tibor R. Machan

6 Freedom in Economics

New perspectives in normative

analysis

Edited by Jean-Francois Laslier,

Marc Fleurbaey, Nicolas Gravel and

Alain Trannoy

12 The Age of Reasons

Quixotism, sentimentalism

and political economy in

eighteenth-century Britain

Wendy Motooka

7 Against Politics

On government, anarchy and

order

Anthony de Jasay

13 Individualism in Modern

Thought

From Adam Smith to Hayek

Lorenzo Infantino

14 Property and Power in Social

Theory

A study in intellectual rivalry

Dick Pels

24 The Social and Political

Thought of Noam Chomsky

Alison Edgley

25 Hayek’s Liberalism and Its

Origins

His idea of spontaneous

order and the Scottish

Enlightenment

Christina Petsoulas

15 Wittgenstein and the Idea of

a Critical Social Theory

A critique of Giddens,

Habermas and Bhaskar

Nigel Pleasants

16 Marxism and Human

Nature

Sean Sayers

26 Metaphor and the Dynamics

of Knowledge

Sabine Maasen and

Peter Weingart

17 Goffman and Social

Organization

Studies in a sociological

legacy

Edited by Greg Smith

27 Living with Markets

Jeremy Shearmur

28 Durkheim’s Suicide

A century of research and

debate

Edited by W. S. F. Pickering and

Geoffrey Walford

18 Situating Hayek

Phenomenology and the

neo-liberal project

Mark J. Smith

29 Post-marxism

An intellectual history

Stuart Sim

19 The Reading of Theoretical

Texts

Peter Ekegren

30 The Intellectual as

Stranger

Studies in spokespersonship

Dick Pels

20 The Nature of Capital

Marx after Foucault

Richard Marsden

21 The Age of Chance

Gambling in Western culture

Gerda Reith

31 Hermeneutic Dialogue and

Social Science

A critique of Gadamer and

Habermas

Austin Harrington

22 Reflexive Historical

Sociology

Arpad Szakolczai

32 Methodological

Individualism

Background, history and

meaning

Lars Udehn

23 Durkheim and

Representations

Edited by W. S. F. Pickering

33 John Stuart Mill and

Freedom of Expression

The genesis of a theory

K. C. O’Rourke

41 Tocqueville’s Moral and

Political Thought

New liberalism

M. R. R. Ossewaarde

34 The Politics of Atrocity and

Reconciliation

From terror to trauma

Michael Humphrey

42 Adam Smith’s Political

Philosophy

The invisible hand and

spontaneous order

Craig Smith

35 Marx and Wittgenstein

Knowledge, morality, politics

Edited by Gavin Kitching and

Nigel Pleasants

43 Social and Political Ideas of

Mahatma Gandhi

Bidyut Chakrabarty

36 The Genesis of Modernity

Arpad Szakolczai

44 Counter-Enlightenments

From the eighteenth century to

the present

Graeme Garrard

37 Ignorance and Liberty

Lorenzo Infantino

45 The Social and Political

Thought of George Orwell

A reassessment

Stephen Ingle

38 Deleuze, Marx and Politics

Nicholas Thoburn

39 The Structure of Social

Theory

Anthony King

46 Habermas

Rescuing the public sphere

Pauline Johnson

40 Adorno, Habermas and the

Search for a Rational Society

Deborah Cook

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