Abstract
The challenge of realizing the democratic power of publics through public sphere remains acute but not hopeless. While claiming that Habermas communicative social theory offers a way forward in spite of a productive but constraining turn towards a modified social liberal frame, nonetheless three limitations of the theory are identified. The first bears on the insufficiency of the sociological evolutionist description of society relevant to the public sphere drawn from classical sociological accounts of differentiation and integration. The second identifies learning theoretical limitations of the normative interactionist, proceduralist account of democracy and democratization potentials. And the third observes on the disconnection between the theory of communicative reasoning from, on the one hand, the critique of pathologies of reasoning, and, on the other, from its implications for lifeworld rationalization. These identified limitations are intended to provide new impetus to radically rethink the public sphere as intrinsic to solving contemporary problems of democracy that Habermas’s more recent account of deliberative theory, with the public sphere merely supplementary, cannot fully do. Yet, with Habermas, this should be on the basis of advancing the communication theory of democracy.
Introduction
This article takes on the task of both providing a general account of Habermas’s shifting theory of the public sphere, while also, building from the later Habermas, attempting to reconstruct it. The main aim of the reconstructive intention is to add a radical democratic and more overtly critical edge to a theory that has become too secured in the social liberal frame of reference to do full justice to the implications of profound social change for contemporary democracy. Thus reoriented, the public sphere may be understood as intrinsic to the revitalization of democracy, and given greater status than its important derivative, deliberative democracy. Thus, the article does not attempt to displace Habermas’s vital contribution to the communication theory of democracy and society but aims to provide orientation for its further deepening to address the immense challenges of the times, where the very legitimacy of democracy itself is brought into question in parts of many societies and in many parts of the world.
The article proceeds in a number of steps. In the first step, it offers some general comments on the development of the public sphere concept across Habermas’s very long career, attempting also to specify its core contribution to understanding the role of publics in democracy. It then moves on to identify a variety of limitations with the theory that impedes its value for bridging social change and democracy, specifically targeting the overemphasis on the political liberal frame of reference. The way out, constantly kept in view in the process of identifying these limitations, is not against Habermas but, so to speak, with him towards a radicalization of his communication theory of society so as to make the public sphere more prominent as a direct agency of democracy. This suggests, taken up in a final step, that the radicalization of the theory of the public sphere must be associated with participatory democratic change to more actively and more equally include publics in political processes, broadly understood.
Preliminary remarks on the concept of the public sphere
In its initial formulation as long ago as 1962, Habermas brought to centre stage a complex idea lying at the heart of post-enlightenment democracy, the centrality of a public capable of self-understanding and critique (Habermas, 1989). 1 While this has been an insistent idea of democracy for more than two centuries, it was still far from adequately recognized at the time given the prevalence of institutionalist and elitist ways of justifying democracy. Before Habermas, in 1927, John Dewey had similarly articulated the centrality of the associative form of the public as the principal and indispensable political association and also its inability to function as needed in the then existing conditions of democracy and society (Dewey, 1927). The two ideas raised by Dewey also characterize Habermas’s early treatment, though Habermas does not make direct reference to him; on the one hand, the public is normatively essential to democracy, indeed no democracy can exist without a sufficient degree of enlightened public will, and, on the other, it has extreme difficulty in sufficiently and appropriately consolidating and asserting its will in modern political arrangements. Both Dewey and Habermas understand the public as a communicative association. An enlightened public required appropriate conditions for its gestation and effectiveness. If this was not forthcoming, then authoritarianism in one or more of its various forms threatened to assert itself.
Both Dewey and Habermas also understood that the idea of a ‘regulative’ public, even if far from fulfilled in the respective conditions arising from their empirical consideration, was more than a mere aspiration. It had become embedded in institutional forms of state and law and permeated democratic culture to whatever extent such a culture was formed. But the conditions for both the assertion and the acceptance of its normative role in 1920s America or 1960s Europe remained radically incomplete and counter-forces opposed to its role were constantly emerging. These forces might have denied it its full normative role but, at least in some cases, notably fascism, would not deny, and even encouraged, public influence in the form of dangerous and unspecific mass loyalties to authoritarian regimes. The assertion that democracy is dependent on the normative role of the public is not uncontested in the academic literature. Throughout the last 150 years of democratic experimentation in the different circumstances of different times and periods, the public’s role has frequently been regarded as confined to voting and it has been construed as intrinsically and permanently incompetent (Dalton, 1988). It has accordingly been relegated to a component of democracy, specifically merely granted the final say on which set of elites shall govern within established legal–political institutions. These institutions are, moreover, attached to factors to which the public is frequently presented as only indirectly relevant, such as the rule of law, notably the constitution, the technocratic role of expertise in governance, the prescribed agenda of the national cultural inheritance, the importance of the craft and judgement of entrenched elites, the basic rationale of economic growth and sustaining capitalism in its many forms, national competitiveness and security, and the emphasis on the winning and using of power as success-oriented strategy. While in viewing the history of relatively long-established democracies, the hegemony of these forces that cannot be intrinsically democratically justified has been contested, both academically and practically they have offered a persistent counterweight to the possibility of radical democracy. Touraine speaks of the persistence of hierarchy in European societies up to the civilizational crisis of the 1960s (Touraine, 1971). Such an idea carries with it the idea of an enduring, though always evolving, conservative non-democratic Hobbesian order merely co-existing with democracy, but not at all convinced by the claims of the public to represent itself as its heartbeat. Today, as the challenge to hierarchy is extended on many fronts, some of these conservative forces lurch further towards authoritarianism, driven by resentment at declining relative privilege or even the very idea of it. The alternative, the deepening of democracy in the direction of radical public involvement, remains both a diffuse and obscure idea, not least because it has not received sustained academic attention to become sufficiently mainstream within intellectual traditions as to force itself to wider attention. Admittedly, the public sphere tradition is an exception and the associated concept of deliberative democracy has been a conspicuous success, though the latter has been ambivalent about the participatory redesign of democratic institutions and culture. This ambivalence has not always been for bad reasons, but nonetheless democratic institutions have lurched into crisis and not just because publics have become alienated but also because of intrinsic limitations in organizing social forces to bring about a more just society.
The public sphere in Habermas
For the above reasons, among others, the concept of the public sphere as developed by Habermas remains of great importance. From its first formulation onwards, it has always intrinsically entailed a focus on the norm as well as the fact of the relation between the public and democracy. Insistently throughout its various formulations, if not always explicitly, it has remained coupled to the capacity of reason to mediate between norm and fact, but in the Kantian and Hegelian enlightenment tradition does not assume the subordination of norm to fact. The learning capacities of the public in a democratic register can reach beyond what is currently the case towards the realization of available rational potentials. Yet, projecting the potentials of the public is not simply normative in the form of a basic philosophical argument. It is also objectively embedded in the possibilities and constraints of the social conditions revealed by the theory of society. Habermas’s theory of society has drawn from many sources over time, but, relevant to the public sphere, it has shifted from a Marxist influenced position in the 1960s to combining functionalist, Weberian and pragmatist theories of differentiation, rationalization and communication from the 1980s onwards. The shift has led to an at times uneasy balancing act between the various emphases on communication action and deliberation, on the one pole, and rationalization and media-steered social systems on the other. The Marxist motif does not entirely disappear; it weakens over time, but the basic idea remains of the reifying implications of dysfunctional systemic complexes for the everyday lifeworld as part of a general concern with the public controlling its own conditions of life.
The basic ideas that Habermas advanced in the 1962 book are often today regarded as beginning a trend, from the very outset, towards excessive idealization. 2 They involve certain assumptions regarding the democratic embodiment of reason that he claimed to have attained evanescent historical realization in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century bourgeois society before being snuffed out, primarily through the growth of capitalism and its impact on the conditions of publicity. These include the bracketing of status differentials in the public sphere, its assumed capacity to integrate society as a whole, the idea that it should concern a discourse about the general common good and the presumption of the separation of state and society (Fraser, 1992). Viewed as a statement of historical actuality, then or since, these theses are relatively easy to argue against, especially if their strong universalistic implications are taken literally. But, viewed as the tentative historical manifestation of a new category within a democratic society, somewhat against Frasers otherwise insightful interpretation, they are much more defensible. The first three can be thus defended as counterfactual ideals for which there was some evidence for a concomitant societal development that, though far from the ideal, nevertheless tended in its direction. Such a defence also allows that the initial formulation of the ideals may be revised in the light of later developments, for example, adjusting the ideal of comprehensive normative integration to the circumstances of a polycentric society. The last one, the relatively strong assumption of the need to decisively separate state and society is more of a problem in that it potentially restricts the scope of the public transformation of political authority, an issue that persists up to and including Habermas’s last really full statement on the public sphere in Between Facts and Norms (hereafter BFN) (Habermas, 1996). The early Habermas was still working within a Marxist perspective that he was in the process of reconstructing and, to some degree, this offered a horizon for perceiving the potential public transformation of structures of authority. Yet, influenced by the ‘degeneration thesis’ of the early Frankfurt school, this horizon remains a relatively unutilized potential, though the last chapters of the book on structural transformation already indicated a projective-affirmative complement to the degeneration thesis. Over time, with the growth in importance of system-theoretical and normative philosophical motifs in his thinking from the late 1970s onwards, the diagnosis of overarching crisis ceased to be at the centre of his work as he began to perceive the twin necessities of functional adaptation and liberal democracy in more positive light. This does not mean, as some aver, that he merely became a centrist liberal; rather that he believed that social theoretical informed normative assessments had to acknowledge what was stored in societal institutions and practices as a result of long learning processes of both a functional and democratic nature. The embedding of his theory advances, such as communicative reason, deliberative democracy, the postnational constellation, in their complex contexts indicated a continuing sense of the need to overcome injustice.
Viewed retrospectively therefore, the 1962 book was notably self-limiting. It remained a pivotal statement on the significance of the public to democracy, demonstrating how the societal environment of democracy critically affected its core functioning. Nonetheless, the idyll of the public sphere lay in the past and it was not clear how the then future could rediscover the assumed since of participatory vitality. At the same time, on the basis of the huge range of scholarship integrated in the text, together with a powerful statement of the significance of communication that offers an alternative, more positive impulse than the degeneration thesis, the text indicates how communication and democracy could now be rethought to envisage a new kind of democracy. This could be done by others, but it was also done in a distinctive way by Habermas himself in his later work. Much could be said of the treatment of the public sphere in various works between 1962 and the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action (hereafter TCA) in the early 1980s, which, for reasons of space, I will not address here (Habermas, 1984, 1987). Yet, TCA indicates a major shift in Habermas’s thinking on matters relevant to the public sphere, even if the explicit concept of the public sphere per se is notably absent from the discussion. What is introduced, though, is an emphatic concept of communicative reason, which is the ‘cognitively active’ part of the, for him, newly emphasized concept of the lifeworld. This sphere of communicative action is connected to this phenomenologically operating lifeworld though the historical effect of reason in rationalizing it in three dimensions, culture, society and personality. Extending the communicative paradigm further, Habermas introduced the idea of the material reproduction of the lifeworld through media-steered social systems. In this account, it was not very clear how society could be integrated, as the relationship between the lifeworld and media-steered systems was presented variously either in a positive light as necessary differentiation or in a negative light in the form of colonization but not from within an explicit democratic perspective. The entire democratic complex that would later be introduced to coordinate this fundamental relationship, and social practices generally, only came later in BFN (Habermas, 1996).
Without specific treatment of the democratic implications of the new architecture of the theory of society presented in TCA, the role of the public sphere disappeared from view. Yet it could be inferred to be associated with the idea of the ‘problematization’ of the background certainties of the lifeworld in the process of communicative reasoning. The public sphere was where such problematization occurred. The theory of communicative reason involved a major upgrading of Habermas’s account of reasoning. It’s communicative presuppositions in the ‘linguistification’ of both reason and social theory were an important step forward, not least, if only implicitly, for the theory of the public sphere. Above all in this respect, the account of making and testing validity claims entailed the outline of a cognitive theory of reasoning and thus gave some indicative, though incomplete, sense of what both the mechanisms and the substance of debate in the public sphere might consist. The project to recast both social and normative theory in communicative terms opening out from TCA was a very large one and, if the basic hypothesis that such a communicative transformation was essential, the public sphere and the normative core of democracy would also have to be accordingly rethought. In this light, while it is certainly important to draw attention to contradictions and limitations of TCA in various dimensions, and I will take up some of these later, the most fundamental implication was a challenge to move towards what Habermas understood as an encompassing communicative paradigm. This challenge has on the whole not been met, partly because of limitations in Habermas’s original account, but even more because of limitations in both the epistemologies of social theory and the various cultural and normative ‘sciences’.
In the 1980s, Habermas become increasingly concerned with issues first arising in liberal political theory, most significantly in Rawls’s theory of justice and the latter’s examination of the elements of a normatively well-governed society. This reception of Rawls offered a means whereby the ‘democratic deficit’ in TCA could be addressed. The concept of the public sphere made a forceful re-emergence in the major outcome of this phase of his career in BFN. In this account, the relatively stark polarization of system and lifeworld of TCA was re-envisioned to allow for the ultimate primacy of the mediating operations of deliberation in law and politics and the adjacent operations of the public sphere. The societal theoretical architecture became significantly altered. The renewed emphasis on the political complex in BFN involved expanded consideration of both the public sphere and civil society; the focus of the 1962 account was on the public sphere as an interstitial space between the state and civil society. The focus of TCA was on the differentiation and subsequent relation between system and lifeworld. This leads in BFN to an implicit fourfold architecture, the public complex (including the state, law beyond the state, parliament and the half-public mass media), civil society, the private sphere and, finally, formally organized social spheres organized through systemic logics. If the original dynamic underpinning the 1962 book on the public sphere was centred on the public sphere as lying between state and civil society, restricted and degenerated by the operation of economic power in the latter, then this expanded architecture, never really formalized though responsive to cues from multiple sources ranging from functionalism, to Marxism, to pragmatism, to liberal theory, made the societal theoretical specification of the public sphere much more challenging.
Although the public sphere was not explicitly developed in any sustained way in TCA, a ‘space’ of communicative reason was identified in which the background certainties of the lifeworld are continuously examined and sometimes transformed through learning processes. In BFN, the public sphere makes a return and a complementary communicative concept of deliberation within the political core (public complex) is also relatedly brought to the fore. The lifeworld stands behind the whole as a pre-reflexive communicatively organized substructure of latent, for the time being unexamined, beliefs. There is a further distinction between public and private autonomy in the book which are described as equiprimordial, and, with regard to which, the public sphere is associated with public autonomy. But the task of such public autonomy is not least the preservation and appropriate extension of private rights and responsibilities.
In BFN, the relation between the deliberative core and the public sphere on the periphery is characterized by segmentary differentiation. The public sphere is specialized in turning diffuse personal experiences into collectively articulated and topically bundled messages that resonate in the deliberative core, creating obligations to take account of these messages and, through an adequate deliberate process, to generate legitimate normative outcomes. The relation between core and periphery is understood through the alternate possibilities in a ‘siege’ or a ‘sluice’ metaphor as a means of capturing the influence of the public periphery on the core. In this way, the public sphere demonstrates a capacity for ‘thematization’, but not for normative selection, which is the prerogative of the deliberative core. I will not elaborate further here on Habermas’s insightful account of the structures, actors and operations of the public sphere in BFN, apart from giving short attention to two points where he follows Cohen and Arato’s book on civil society in Chapter 8 of BFN (Cohen & Arato, 1994). The first point is where he draws attention to the necessity of a rationalized lifeworld in order for the public sphere to blossom. And the second is where he approvingly outlines the idea of the ‘self-limitation’ of a democratic tradition. This self-limitation would lie in that (a) a robust civil society requires a liberal culture and a correspondingly rationalized lifeworld; (b) ideas and contestation emanating from the societal periphery would have to go through the filter of parliamentary debate; (c) movements for change should be self-limiting in the light of the complexity and differentiation of social structures and should give up holistic ideas of a self-organizing society in the revolutionary tradition. And, finally, he notes that there are different models of thematization, from inside the deliberative core not directly involving the public (insider access), the mobilization of the public through the deliberative core (mobilization) and initiation by movements or interest groups beyond the formal political system (outside-initiative).
The general description of the public sphere provided by Habermas in BFN of which the above is a relevant selection conveys a broadly liberal sensibility. It is strikingly different from an earlier work of the 1970s which emphasized the immanence of multiple levels of crisis from system irrationality to motivation deficits of citizens within a modified Marxist theoretical frame. Its title, Legitimation Crisis, tells its own story (Habermas, 1975). The account of law and politics within BFN shows increased affirmation of the liberal political order and its deliberative and communicative institutions. It is by no means a naive affirmation and, in part, it is also a renunciation of any vestiges of the goal of radical revolutionary change that survived within the Marxist tradition and had some modulated presence in Habermas’s own thinking before TCA. In this broad shift, the public sphere becomes once more a positive force for conveying opinions from the societal periphery with the assumption that in the end they will be heard and acted upon. Ultimately, the assumption is that liberal political institutions, historically made by successive social movements and by ongoing adaptation, have sufficient will and intelligence to truly listen and learn. As respect for the limited and selective but still significant achievements of democracy, neglected in much critical thinking, it is an important consideration. But from a radical reconstructive perspective, it is not a sufficient account of what is needed – an account of transformative collective learning accompanied by equivalent institutional change – for the further democratization of democracy adequate to address accelerating socio-natural problems and both new and enduring pathologies and injustices. I have to leave as relatively self-evident that there currently exists a combined crisis both of society and liberal institutions in the present period, a view endorsed in much of the empirical literature. The working assumption is that further democratization is needed to allay this de-legitimation and that democratization ultimately depends on problem-disclosing and problem-solving progressive collective learning within civil society, which could overcome the problem-compounding authoritarian and regressive collective learning that is so much in evidence across the world. For this, the revitalization and expansion of the public sphere is of the first importance.
Limitations of Habermas’s account of the public sphere
At the most general level, the essential problem of Habermas’s theorizing of the public sphere is that the various essential components that he outlines do not add up to a compelling framework, that is to say, one that adequately captures the full implications of the actuality and potentiality – in the right institutional conditions – of public discourse. To a considerable extent, the parts are there: the conception of rational–critical public opinion; the account of communicative reason in itself and its extension beyond an account of truth to an account of rightness; the embedding of communicative reason in a theory of society; and the articulation of a communicative theory of democracy through the related explication of the twin concepts of deliberation and public sphere. But the fragmented manner in which these parts are articulated at different places and times, together with the persisting question of whether Habermas’s orientation is sufficiently radical or critical in a democratic sense to capture the empirically manifested normative challenges of the present, leaves the public sphere concept difficult to employ in normatively informed social research and analysis. I wish to identify here a number of key problems in Habermas’s account that at the same time are intended to offer a path forward. Fully developed, such an altered theory would make the public sphere concept more sociologically serviceable and also increase its critical, transformative implications. The interrelated problems I will briefly discuss are the limitations of (a) the evolutionist model of social structures; (b) the normative interactionist model of reason; and (c) the general insufficiency of the critical thrust.
The evolutionist model of social structures
Although Habermas has continued to draw considerable inspiration from Peirce’s semiotic theory, he does not follow Peirce to develop a comprehensive sign-mediated epistemology even though Peirce is fundamental to discourse ethics and has inspired Habermas throughout his career (Hartshorne et al., 1960, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce). Given Habermas’s remarkable knowledge of both sociological and philosophical traditions, such further development might have generated a comprehensive sign-mediated theory of society, not just the normative interactionist, double contingent, communicative theory that has actually emanated. Such a semiotically based theory, a task that still remains, might well have changed how he conceptualized and temporalized societal facticity towards a thoroughly relational approach in which deep-lying patterns of communicative reasoning are understood as constitutive of those routinized forces that shape experience. Instead, what in the end is most prominent is a variant on an evolutionist reading of societal development. In this, the twin dynamics of rationalization and differentiation are assumed to accompany and mutually sustain each other, while their form and development is understood as largely decoupled from communicative reasoning. The later addition of a normative theory of deliberative democracy does not succeed in addressing this constitutive problem. This theory choice leaves evident problems in its wake.
One illustration of these problems is that rationalization is simply objectively read off the assumed historical development path of modern society through a modified reading of Weber. Its formative mechanisms, critically its association with reasoning, are never fundamentally addressed. The theory of society required by the assumptions underlying communicative reason must be able to show how reasoning and rationalization are related, both in terms of the historical fact of rationalization and the projective anticipation of possibilities of rationalization as a consequence of patterns of reasoning. The concept of lifeworld is certainly an important contribution in this respect, but its evolutionary origins are not genetically shown nor is how it changes across time and place. And its actual function in the theory is also confusing. It might be said to be the pre-reflexive structure of beliefs that habitually guide agents – here Habermas in 2019 makes extensive use of Peirce’s doubt–belief model in a compatible manner (Habermas, 2019). But we still need to know the inputs and outputs between the operations of reasoning of different kinds and consequent continuity and variation in the forms of the lifeworld. Otherwise, the lifeworld appears to acquire a type of static enduring quality that appears to draw too much from the hermeneutic idea of tradition, which is not Habermas’s intention. The fluidizing effect of communicative reason and the insertion of processes of validity-testing as an arbiter of appropriate, true and truthful meaning was instead intended by Habermas to enable a breach with historically over-concrete idealizations of this kind. But, without the connecting thread of demonstrating the outcomes of reasoning for rationalization and vice versa, there is a bifurcation between the account of reason and its societal theoretical implications that diminishes its sociological usefulness.
A second illustration of the problems of the evolutionist model is to be found in Habermas’s (1996) discussion of the public sphere in BFN (p. 365), where he discusses the resonance of public communication in private experiences, essential for its concretization in life histories and thus its motivational power. Of interest here is the manner in which the source of this – problematic – resonance is characteristically attributed to ‘the externalities (and internal disturbances) of the various functional systems – and even by the very state apparatus on whose regulatory activities the complex and poorly coordinated sub-systems depend’. This short statement is illustrative of the thrust of Habermas’s thinking since the colonization thesis in TCA. It is concerned with problems, pathologies and injustices that emanate from system contexts and are taken to affect the capacity of the lifeworld to generate appropriate meaning. In cases where the problems are adequately diagnosed in the public sphere, collective learning and adequate deliberation are made possible, potentially leading to political or broader structural change. While this is, as far as it goes, not problematic, indeed echoes Wright Mill’s classic diagnosis of public problems and private troubles, it is insufficient (Mills, 2000). What is not addressed are the pathologies of the lifeworld per se, on the one hand, and the reasoning pathologies that in substantial measure give rise to them on the other. It leads to static possibilities of expository and critical analysis based on structural categories – both social and cultural – alone. Accordingly, the public, society constituting power of reasoning, the very essence of Habermas’s theory, becomes isolated and ineffective.
For both Castoriadis and Touraine, the concepts of differentiation and rationalization are assumed to provide very limited frames for understanding social change (Joas & Knöbl, 2009). For Castoriadis, they are heteronymous rather than intrinsic forces and lead to an emphasis on social change as external to actors rather than imagined and willed by them (Castoriadis, 1998). For Touraine, while he does not deny the integrating force of norms and values, social struggle, articulated in divergent stances within cultural models – for example, capital versus labour, technocracy versus the new social movements – extends beyond the instituted order to the constitutive power of subjects, including social movements (Touraine, 1977). Both these thinkers, and Hans Joas too, explicitly in an early critique of TCA, prepare the way for an ontological critique of Habermas’s limitations in grasping how society is constituted and reconstituted (Joas, 1988). It is in this sense that Touraine identifies the power of the subject to act autonomously and outside the existing social order. It holds the idea that the description of society’s functioning is not adequately met by the established structural categories of sociology, though rationalization has a part to play (Touraine, 1995). The subjective capacity to phenomenologically filter social actuality in order to reorient its direction, one way or another, has to be given primacy, albeit within socio-historical and natural constraints. 3 The implications for the theory of the public sphere are radical. It calls for a phenomenological reassertion of the constitutive power of consciousness as the ultimate starting point for the theory, a direction that will ultimately lead to a better blending of ontology and epistemology. 4
Limitations of the normative interactionist account of communicative reason
A second limitation is associated with the social ontological ‘space’ reasoning has been accorded. In BFN, Habermas (1996) describes the public sphere as a ‘social space generated in communicative action’ (italics in the original, p. 360). In this, he distinguishes it from the core lifeworld function of social integration through reproduction in the areas of ‘religion, education and the family’ and the ‘different validity aspects’ taken up by science, morality and art. As a social space generated in communication action, he claims the public sphere ‘refers neither to the functions nor to the contents of everyday communication’ (p. 360). If consideration is extended on this basis to Habermas theory of formal pragmatics, the symmetry between the idea of the public sphere as a social space and the normative interactionist assumptions of communicative action becomes apparent. These assumptions block out the question of content, that is, the question of substance, and the public sphere becomes thought about as communicative action is thought about, as the formal and interactionist processing of validity claims. This interactionist process, notably when deliberatively controlled, is assumed to lead to ultimate agreement on the correct norm to adopt, if the procedure is sufficiently inclusive and neutral as to outcome and carried on long enough.
Although the theory has a predominantly intersubjective focus, it could be defended on the grounds that its normative interactionist presuppositions enable it to evade possible problems in subjective and objective dimensions. Given the range of validity claims identified and the presumption of exhaustive interaction on a specific issue, it might be claimed that it can sufficiently address both perspectival differences, that is to say, subjective variation, and also objective considerations relating to world description that is both true and fair. But, firstly with regard to subjectivity, in the light of the world constituting role of consciousness, this is not very compelling. The emergence and consolidation of – subjective – perspectives as they enter into reasoning is a protracted process. Condensing such an inevitably extended process into the limited temporal horizons of normative interactive procedures denies sight of the long learning process entailed. It ultimately more or less leaves out of consideration, or, at the very least, does not treat adequately, the long gestation of innovative ideas. It obscures the slow perceptual shifts they entail, including the gradual concretization of the will to insistently fight for change, not just among those affected but also the perpetrators of suffering in those many cases where it applies, over long historical periods. Only now, in 2020, to give one immediate example, is there to be seen anything like a deep-seated general change in perceptions of denied recognition to people of colour. It remains an open question how far it will go in terms of the wide spectrum of change required, but this is not something that could be conceived to be fully deliberatively available prior to the present, indicating how pivotal has been the formation of consciousness and conscience beyond institutions. It may be the case, finally, that it is becoming so now. And this in turn is associated with the long learning process, whose most recent and sustained phase is that of the radical pluralism that springs from the 1960s (O’Mahony, 2014). Hence, through various terms, recognition, subject formation, the formation of moral sensibility, social and political theory attends to the spectrum of feelings that must underpin reasoning and public culture in a way that necessarily points beyond a normative interactionist reading alone.
And, secondly, regarding the objective dimension, at an immediate intuitive level, long confirmed by the experience of the social sciences, it is striking how difficult it is to envisage how Habermas’s theory of communicative reason could be related to social stability and change. And it is correspondingly difficult to see how the public sphere as a pivotal social space of communicative reason could also be so related. A theory of communicative reason would need to show how it processes inputs and outputs from and to identified spheres of socially organized integration, as well as addressing those forces that in one way or another disrupt such integration. Habermas’s account in TCA, to my knowledge not revised, merely assumes that modern societies intrinsically require increased scope of reflexive communication, an evolutionist assumption; hence, in this respect like Luhmann’s account of the relationship between structure and semantics, the transformation of social structures in modernity makes necessary an elevated level of communicative reason, though of course Luhmann’s ‘evolutionism’ does not emphasize reason (Luhmann, 1980). The genetic relationship between social structures, meaning by this both cultural and social structures, and reflexive reasoning is never systematically addressed. Explaining why is too complex to fully address here given space limitations, requiring attention to subjective, intersubjective and trans-subjective dimensions and to the temporal logic of reasoning. Further, it requires attention to the different way in which the objective world has existence, social and natural, and to the independent operation and interplay of the principles of truth and rightness (Strydom, 2019). And it also requires, in addition to Habermas ‘domain-based’ validity model, that is, focussed on objective, social and subjective worlds relatively separately, the introduction of an inferential account of the interweaving of the different phases of reasoning, in Peirce, abductive or conjectural, deductive or principled and inductive or applied. This much may be said. Without the addition of a sufficiently robust inferential and processual account of reasoning that could integrate the various inferential dimensions of reasoning, abductive, deductive and inductive, as well as the domains of reasoning, subjective, intersubjective and trans-subjective, and the various functions or spaces of reasoning, individual reflection, small-scale interaction, the public sphere, deliberation, formally organized spheres, and multiple other spaces, the theory of communicative reasoning cannot have the sociological value its potential indicates it should have. An interconnected inferential account enables the lifeworld to be genetically understood as a structure of stabilized inferences with greater or lesser temporal endurance and thus gives real substance to Habermas’s idea of its communicative rationalization. Without a theory of inference, neither the cohesive relations that give cultural forms an integrative force nor the reconstruction of such forms in reasoning can be explained. And without these features, cultural analysis will always tend towards the lack of general orientation characteristic of the predilection for ‘local’ interpretation. Although the latter is entirely foreign to Habermas’s intentions, the history of the reception and development of the idea of communicative reason in and beyond his own work over the last 40 years gives rise to no sense of confidence that the paradigm has in this respect operated ‘progressively’ in this period, though, to stress the point again, this is mainly not a problem of its initial potential but of its development.
Above and beyond the above features, communicative reason will have to systematically address the question of immanent transcendence, an idea that Habermas himself developed, the human capacity to be in a situation and yet imaginatively see beyond it to social arrangements or forms that are not currently in existence, but that could be in some possible world. For this purpose, Strydom’s account of the cognitive order is an essential idea. He understands the cognitive order as a sphere of presuppositional, idealizing and mediating sociocultural principles that have evolutionarily stabilized over time and which fill in on the ‘transcendent’ plane in such a way as to make space for trans-subjective and subjective dimensions, as much as the complementary intersubjective dimension developed by Habermas (O’Mahony, 2013; Strydom, 2011). The ‘principles’ of the cognitive order are overarching, transcendently located cognitive principles that operate as trans-subjective basic presuppositions of being in the world that ‘exist before’ any kind of thought or action. Some examples of these are the sensibility and capacity to think, speak and act within the discursive orders of legitimacy, legality, dignity, control, efficiency and so on. Just as inferential categories are blended in sense-making practices, so also are these cognitive principles, each carrying distinctive inferential logics, blended in such practices. Ultimately, in a way that I cannot adumbrate fully here, this cognitive–inferential approach supplements and attempts to complete Habermas’s formal pragmatic account. I will just add this one last point. The transcendent moment in the immanent–transcendent form is designed to address the question: What enables humans to make imaginative leaps to innovative thinking and ultimately knowledge? This cannot be explained by dominant epistemological assumptions before and up to Peirce, and regrettably far beyond him, where it has mostly been addressed in an unsatisfactory, frequently ‘irrationalist’ manner. 5
The theoretical assumption of the above is that communicative reason – bearing in mind that it can also be communicative ‘unreason’ – must be shown to be operative in all of what Somers calls relational settings, that is to say, adapting the term for this context, the multiplicity of social settings that are at least partly constituted by discursively formed relations of meaning (Somers, 1993). The inferential structure of reasoning will be formally in common if, in practice, substantively varying across these discursively structured settings. There are no impermeable boundaries to the flow of meaning between them, which, for example, means that public discourse, in the sense of the discourse of general publics, must be regarded as powerfully entering into legal and political deliberation, and, of course, also the other way round. The public sphere will therefore be revealed to be not just a social space, in which a certain kind of normatively structured interaction takes place, but the context for producing a type of meaning with the quality of publicness, which penetrates all types and spaces of reasoning, for example, individual consciousness following the idea of the social mind of Peirce, Mead and Dewey, the various contexts of deliberation, small group interaction and the multiple other sites of reasoning across all human activities. The public sphere is to be regarded, therefore, not only as a social space built upon the rules of a certain kind of interaction but also as a sphere of particular kinds of public consciousness and of trans-subjective content. Furthermore, Habermas’s strong emphasis on normative agreement must be regarded as only one kind of outcome of public reasoning. The role of rational dissensus is additionally especially important. It entails stabilization of competing claims to validity, where opposing principles are respected on all sides, to allow certain outcomes to be reached, though there is no final agreement on the principles themselves (Miller, 1992; O’Mahony, 2013). The reason for emphasizing rational dissensus as part of a critique of Habermas’s excessive reliance on the normative interactionist approach, though rational dissensus may rightly be seen as far from antithetical to normatively guided interaction per se, derives from the idea that agreements other than those that are fully consensual implicate the full structure of social struggles and opportunities and blockages for learning at given times and places. Discourse ethics, relatively speaking, neglects these and other types of possible normative outcome. Habermas and Apel are not wrong in emphasizing the telos of potential agreement that underpins argumentation, – otherwise, why argue? – but they so in a way that too closely ties the principle of argument to its outcomes. The net effect is that the dispersion of the culture of issues and the plurality of social positions that characterize both inputs and outcomes of argumentation are occluded. Admittedly, there is one important qualification here; consensual frames of argumentation are in the end of extreme importance on certain normative matters, though societies also must operate without them on many matters.
The expansion of the possible outcomes of reasoning in a dissensual direction greatly increases the salience of the public sphere in public affairs, as it no longer needs to be regarded as a way station to another, more focussed and consensual kind of deliberative reasoning. It also produces outcomes, in the case of ‘positive’ outcomes mainly, but not always, of a dissensual kind, in its own right. In this situation, deliberation in law or politics may not be able to ‘get beyond’ such outcomes of public discourse. This may have good or bad consequences, as it implies that a regular outcome of public discourse is either controlled – dissensual – or uncontrolled polarization. Either way, it indicates the power of publics and suggests that democratization must go further than the liberal model in incorporating publics in deliberative processes, a matter that this model is beginning to explore but only at the margins. To a lesser extent, this applies to Habermas’s overly normative interactionist account too.
Implicit rather than explicit critique
There is little explicit treatment of critique in either TCA or BFN. A critique of reification as the juridification of social relations is present in TCA and critical motifs have a fragmented presence in both texts. Notwithstanding, the theoretical foundations of critique are not systematically addressed, which is also a more general problem in critical theory. It might be argued in defence of Habermas that his architectonic of communicative reason, which places the standard of validity at its core within an interactionist frame, has at least made manifest the space of critique, allowing the participants themselves to identify and overcome learning and functional barriers to a just society within this space. But this is an indirect and unsatisfactory way of addressing critique, guided by the quasi-transcendent projection of right democratic procedures rather than identifying manifest injustices and pathologies. Moreover, the question arises of what the purpose of critical theory consists if critique is only so to speak shown to be possible by those affected, even in the long run these will always be its ultimate carriers. This speaks more to the influence of the narrower, if also fundamental, Kantian sense of critique rather than the extended Marx-derived emphasis on critique of actual social practices directed towards revealing hidden pathologies and injustices.
The normative projection of a democratically just society also affects how actual societal development is characterized; tendencies towards increased deliberation in some limited respects – in a context in which regression behind achieved levels of deliberation is also actually taking place – become subtly changed into an assumption of far-reaching actual and, still more, potential deliberation. While it is true that deliberation is more extensive than has typically been recognized in political theory, and far greater than recognized in sociology, overestimation of its actual realization obscures opposing developments. One example of the latter is the contemporary tendency to bypass it in favour of secretive governmental cabals merely seeking to mobilize publics beyond parliamentary, and even cabinet, deliberation. It also obscures the corresponding concretization of deliberation-impeding values among publics, for example, the relatively wide adherence to neoliberalism over the last three decades and, more recently, white supremacism. The former has gone a considerable distance towards displacing in an individualistic direction the more solidarity-based culture of welfare-state redistribution, leading to increasing legitimacy of objective monetary rather than intersubjective communicative coordination. The outcomes of this, often in the form of paradoxical experiences, are not matters that can be readily deliberatively resolved without much deeper and fundamental societal learning processes extended over time. The emphasis on deliberation has actually worked to distract from sufficient emphasis on the public sphere and the diffuse processes of cultural change, both in the sense of fundamental work on rethinking the concept and extending the range of empirical studies. Much as I am an admirer of the argumentative thoroughness of political philosophy in the Habermas tradition, I also would not deny that this situation partly reflects disciplinary limitations, both of philosophy and the social sciences in characteristic ways, and, still more, their very limited capacity for cooperation even within critical theory whose founding moment was so oriented. The essential point arising from this is the great missed opportunity for telling critique, for extending the ‘sociological imagination’ of Wright Mills, a task with which more than sociologists should be concerned (Mills, 2000).
These brief ‘actuality indicating’ remarks suggest that the public sphere extends far into the space reserved for deliberation by Habermas, with implications in both a ‘negative’ and a ‘positive’ register. In a negative register, as well as serving as the means of constructing and articulating public will, the operations of the public sphere in their own right routinely take the form of injustice and pathology. In this latter respect, empirically observed in various of its contemporary forms, it becomes a means of generating or accentuating intrinsic lifeworld injustices such as racism, woman-directed and homophobic violence, social exclusion and many other matters as the expression of its various pathological, power-imbalanced modalities. It is an easy point to make, given contemporary understanding, that the extension of the process forms of the public sphere through new technologies has had the effect of accentuating such trends, at least in their current state of everyday and regulatory non-maturity. 6 For critical scholarship, therefore, the task is not only one of exploring how the public sphere enables publics to offer resistance to policies and ideas and to ‘progressively’ redirect society through learning processes, but it is also one of showing how learning processes within it may take deeply regressive forms and become oppressive. For many, this is counter-intuitive, but a sociological account of learning must not deny that its social opponents can themselves learning. In this sense, neoliberalism has been the production of deep and very sophisticated collective learning processes. Further, between the Scylla of projected potentiality and Charybdis of deep regression are to be found the more accepted deviations from universalism in the constructed particularism of, for example, national, ethnic and religious identities that also inhere in the public sphere. While, for Habermas, these identities are ‘ethical’ in form, they routinely take on far-reaching moral standing within given societal communities and profoundly affect the general operations and circles of affectedness of democracy. This way of thinking has major implications for understanding how the justification of validity claims operates in the public sphere. Justification in practice, while always influenced by some kind of cognitive universal, even where such universals are being deliberately inverted, implicates complex issues of how established normative universals meet particulars, for example, the duties owed to non-national refugees, or even to fellow nationals on social policy and other matters. While, on the one hand, it is true that as Habermas asserts democracy has taken root in nation states, it is also true that nation states may emerge in conditions of deep injustice, generate more injustices in their many exclusions and inclusions and ultimately become characterized by multiple injustices and pathologies in their public spheres and lifeworld. Hence, scholarship of the public sphere must fundamentally attend to the intrinsic injustices and pathologies it may itself generate, which may lie in the very mode of communicative reasoning itself in given circumstances. It is therefore striking in this regard the extent to which Habermas – and critical theory more generally – neglects pathologies of reasoning and their implications. The theory of communicative action needs to be developed to intrinsically address when reasoning goes wrong, right at its very core, so that the mechanisms of domination that spring from it, not just potential emancipation, may be properly revealed. This also offer a blueprint as to how the public sphere concept can be radically rethought by embedding within it a thus extended concept of reasoning, moreover one that can be empirically demonstrated and that avoids the highly simplified and constraining account of ‘bads’ and ‘goods’ that bedevils critical social thought in general.
In a positive register, rethinking the role of the public sphere as above in respect of the division of labour between it and deliberative complexes, on the one hand, and the lifeworld, on the other, suggests that in its actual operations it is more powerful in its implications than Habermas proposes. If it is more powerful in key respects, this has major implications for democratic designs in relation to their surrounding societal environment. Habermas’s account of contemporary democratic designs, shorn of incisive critical insights, is an uneasy combination of, following his own theme, facticity and normativity. What currently democratically exists appears to be regarded as having the potential to be normatively extended towards an ideal limit. The question that arises in relation to this is whether the existing forms of liberal democracy, allowing of course for significant variations between the many liberal democracies, really offers a sufficient institutional basis for the normative ideal limit to be approached. Giving his account of reasoning a more ‘realistic’ basis through acknowledging its role in creating and perpetuating injustice opens up the potential for more incisive critique of the developmental potentials of existing democratic forms and the public cultures on which they rest. For all of Rawls’s outstanding work in clarifying the institutional conditions of democratic public reason, his account nevertheless effectively leads to the minimization of the role of the public, with the public sphere being accorded a relatively institutionally distant, merely background role (Rawls, 1993). Habermas to some extent tends in this direction too, perhaps a product of his close engagement with liberal political philosophy, even if his difference from Rawls in this respect is quite significant and his account significantly more public-centred. But, following Maus, it may be said that Habermas still gives too much to the administrative power of the state and law over against the communicative power exercised by publics (Maus, 1995).
The alternative to Habermas’s proposals is to some degree captured by Bohman’s idea of public deliberation rather than institution-bound deliberative democracy (Bohman, 2000). Public deliberation has the connotation of the need for thorough-going democratization that would involve the public directly in democracy. While there has certainly been a downgrading of ‘participation euphoria’ since its post-60s peak, as much as anything because of a lack of will to democratically experiment, the problems of democracy are nonetheless so acute today that it must be reconsidered. Even though Axel Honneth, similar to Habermas, relies heavily on theories of functional differentiation, he does make an interesting suggestion that more attention should be given to Dewey’s ‘experimentalism’ and the idea of creating a ‘reflexive authority’ that could better chart relations between the interdependent parts of society (Honneth, 2016). Honneth does not say so, but this is consistent with Dewey’s idea of building organized or collective intelligence (Dewey, 1944). For Honneth, inferring further, such intelligence needs to be made manifest in multiple social spheres, hence reissuing the early twentieth-century pragmatist idea of expanding democracy beyond the limited qualities of contemporary formal democracy to the general democratization of social spheres. In this respect, insufficient attention has been given to Tom Burns’s idea of ‘organic democracy’, a way of understanding democratization that does not bypass the achievements of liberal institutions, but recognizes that they are increasingly insufficient in the light of the contemporary chaotic development of social spheres replete with incompatible logics (Burns, 1999). Even the welfare state, for all its limitations, involved an ‘experiment’, only half conscious and certainly no more than half pursued, in economic democracy. The critical point here, shifting from public sphere to public spheres, is that the communicative heartbeat of public democratization must be better channelled to affect the life conditions that various publics experience and must result in sufficient empowerment to overcome expanded apathy and despair. The failure to see through the de-commodifying potentials of the welfare state in the form of a communicatively rather than a money-steered society has been a major setback, a point consistent with Honneth’s vision of socialism. But the lesson that the overarching public sphere and multiple specialized public spheres must be reflexively related to different societal contexts, contributing to democratization in these contexts, rather than simply to existing political institutions, must not be lost. And, as Maus suggests, communicative power must be accordingly enhanced over against administrative and state power without destroying the now fragile membrane of these existing representative and juridical institutions (Maus, 1995). Rather, the political landscape should be changed through expanded democratization. The basic motif in such a transition must be that democratization keep pace with social change if overall democratic legitimacy itself is ultimately to be sustained. The lesson of the history of the last 100 years is clear. Structural and cultural change will change the legitimation conditions of public authority in one way or another. If democratization does not keep pace, and even anticipate development in social spheres, democracy itself will be threatened. And without adequate democracy, the natural infrastructure that sustains all forms of life may not survive to rebuild a viable human form of life, a lesson that the current profound environmental crises make abundantly clear. And for this reason alone, it is essential that the power of reconstructive critique must be released. For this, following Mills, a suitably elaborated sociological imagination must be developed with critical publics at its core (Mills, 2000). And this sociological imagination should examine not just the deliberative potential of existing democratic institutions, but also conduct a realistic utopian assessment of new democratic ideals, with a view to arguing that their fledgling societal traction should be radically extended.
Learning from Habermas and ways forward
Notwithstanding the limitations identified above, the more fundamental problem with Habermas’s work is not primarily his problem. It is instead the fact that critical theory and the social sciences generally have not been able to productively and extensively develop what he has crystallized. He has made a major contribution towards bringing the linguistic turn into sociology and thereby has opened the way towards a radical transformation of the discipline. Such a linguistic reformulation of sociology is also directed not towards the horizon of a ‘disintegrating’ model of irretrievable social differentiation, so often asserted within the discipline and in ever new ways, but towards an ever more necessary integrating model of global normative responsibility, made possible by publics capable of learning in the many necessary registers and democratic institutions with the necessary responsivity and deliberative capacity. TCA laid out many of the concepts on which a critical normative sociology could build, even if they were not always arranged in the best way or were lacking in some dimensions. Nonetheless, the particular social theoretical elaboration of the concept of lifeworld shifted the ontological locus of actors in the objective or subjective worlds, the classical terrain of sociology, to intersubjective relations in a societal theoretically suggestive manner. The focus on intersubjectivity emphasises that actors do not simply experience all these worlds but can reflectively, that is, through the reasoned exploration of validity claims, take a position beyond what they immediately experience. In turn, this universally shared capacity for immanent-transcendence socio-epistemically opens the way towards future-oriented reasoning, not just about what could or would be true but about what also could or would be right and good. In this sense, Habermas fulfils the methodological requirements of the enlightenment idea of critique, that is to say, he shows how the world can be re-oriented by our critical capacity to reflect upon it with new presuppositions triggered by experience.
These advances generate the potential for a transformed understanding of public culture. Reasoning within such a culture is shown to be necessarily future-oriented reflection on a societal endowment that can be changed. It is explicitly different in this quality from an alternative Heidegger-inspired idea of the future as ‘unforethinkable’ and the public other as minatory (Ginev, 2003; Habermas, 2003). Here, it takes a distance too from all ontologically backward-looking ideas of culture, including Gadamer inspired hermeneutics and Hegel’s spirit, even if the concept of lifeworld holds some ambivalence in this respect (Gadamer, 1989; Hegel, 2018). Such ideas of the past both as the solitary source of meaning and as constraint have for long dominated in sociology and, even now, after the cultural turn, prevent it seriously engaging with the transformative power of reasoning. The failure to engage in this way, for which the idea of the critical public sphere is central, forces sociology into regressive patterns of understanding that generate confusion and obfuscation. For even bad reasoning, for example, Forst’s bad justification, relies on the capacity for ‘rational’ thought and thereby to imagine, and hence to potentially bind, the future (Forst, 2007). To exclude reasoning from proper consideration, or even to include it as only the reasoning of others in certain kinds of discourse analysis, is contrary to the rationale of critical theorizing that demands normative commitments in the making of judgements. The critical theoretical inheritance crystallized by Habermas makes all of this manifest and accordingly it issues a call for a new kind of future-oriented and explicitly normative relation to both the practice and analysis of public discourse.
In identifying limitations in Habermas’s account of the public sphere over time, bearing in mind that this account has never quite caught up with his general theory, a few key horizons for scholarship recommend themselves (O'Mahony, 2021). The first is that if reason and reasoning is to be fully manifested in the social theoretical account of society, there is a need to show how its presence – or absence – shapes the ontological understanding of that society. The public sphere, and the agency mobilized through it, should therefore be regarded as more constitutive in its societal implications than Habermas grants. This requires attention to the ontological implications of phenomenological consciousness; in other words, ‘constitutive implications’ involves recognizing the power of subjects, notably collective subjects, to reimagine societal possibilities. Such shifts in consciousness ground the perspectives that enter into reasoning, giving it orientation. This is one critical dimension of the epistemic capacity of reason to generate collective learning. If such an approach seeks to extend Habermas’s normative interactionist self-limitation on one side, then, on the other side, the rationalization of the lifeworld has to be more tightly coupled to the trans-subjective quality of such reasoning. The lifeworld should thus, dependent on reasoning, be understood as more variable in its form rather than being mainly perceived to operate as a stable and enduring background consensus. Understood as this more variable form, its role as part of the process of mediating the ‘brute actuality’ of social and natural structures will become apparent, correcting Habermas’s tendency to view such structures as evolving independently in quasi-autonomous complexes of interdependent differentiation and rationalization. These architectonic shifts in theoretical emphasis call also for an understanding of reasoning, at a basic level, as being justifiable or, alternatively, either pathological or unjust or both. As above, the latter needs as much consideration as the former, with the implication that any collective learning that results from reasoning can be regressive as much as progressive (Eder, 1985; Miller, 1986). In fact, the emphasis on regressive potentials might help free sociology from its general contemporary suspicion of the idea of progress, a suspicion that increasingly cuts it off from the critical thinking of the enlightenment and its own, certainly in parts flawed, traditions. It might also have the benefit of making it possible to similarly re-engage with a social evolutionary theory that emphasizes precisely learning and enablement or disablement rather than prescriptive inevitability.
With these proposals, constructively and critically building on Habermas, a revised and more sociologically pertinent theory of the public sphere may be envisaged. Its sociological value lies in the twin concerns of, firstly, not denying the public capacity to constitute society, one way or the other, while also not denying the multiple capacities for its manipulation or pathological deformation. In the light of this, viewed in terms of the diagnosis of critical sociology, liberal democracy needs to be radically transformed and new modalities of participatory democratization brought in to play in the form of deliberation by publics at the core and within the different social spheres. Publics must be empowered if they are to become responsible and they must become responsible if that are to gain control of their life conditions. The public sphere concept therefore itself needs to be radicalized so that public discourse should be analysed both in its tendency to generate far-reaching bewilderment, disorientation and repression but also in its tendency to bring about justified forms of consensus and rational dissensus that are adequate to the challenges that social change is throwing up and, still further, can get beyond and democratically redirect evolving societal trends. In conclusion, it has become absolutely pressing that a new sociological imagination be developed adequate to these tasks at time when empirical changes in the organization and discursive practices of the public sphere are contributing to a constellation that threatens even the most modest ideas of democracy.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
