Habermas’s Case for Democracy: the Public Sphere, Communicative Reason and the ‘Co-originality’ of Public and Private Autonomy

Jürgen Habermas, one of the most influential philosophers of the last half-century, died last March at the age of 96.  Despite his many important contributions to philosophy and social theory, he will perhaps most be remembered as a theorist of the public sphere.   This was the topic of his first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere(1962) [STPS], and he returned to it again thirty years later in Between Facts and Norms [BFN]. Though not directly focused on the public sphere, The Theory of Communicative Action, his magnum opus, provides crucial background and support for his thesis.  Central to his interest in the public sphere—as well as much of his other writing—is a type of normative theorizing known as “immanent critique”.  Its basic aim is not to bring an external (often moral) norm to bear on social reality but rather to “reconstruct” the normative claims implicit in a social practice or set of institutions.  By means of this approach Habermas not only sought to avoid the pitfalls of ‘ideal’ theorizing, on the one hand, and an exclusively ‘realist’ or ‘empiricist’ approach, on the other.  He also maintained that this type of ‘reconstructive’ criticism could preserve a more emancipatory agenda found, for example, in parts of the Marxist tradition and other ‘radical reformist’ movements.

In STPS Habermas traces the emergence of a new social phenomenon—the public sphere—that, at least for a time, offered the prospect of an arena that could mediate between the state and the wider society.  Rooted in the social and economic conditions of liberal capitalism, the ‘bourgeois’ public sphere refers to those socio-cultural institutions that arose in the eighteenth century in opposition to the absolutist powers of the state—private clubs and coffeehouses, learned societies and literary associations, publishing houses, journals and newspapers.  Taken as a whole these institutions constituted a “public realm of reasoning private persons” that was in turn partly secured through various constitutional rights and liberties.  In theory and, to a much more limited extent, in practice this public was distinct from the private spheres of the market and the family and from the political authority of the state.  In its political role it refers to a domain that comes about whenever private persons reason together about their common interests and its function was both to restrain and legitimate the political power exercised by the government.  In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant famously highlighted this sphere with his idiosyncratic distinction public and private:  the “public” use of reason can only be exercised by citizens when not in their “private” capacity as officials of the state (Kant, 55).

Habermas’s further thesis is that this idea of the public sphere was limited, ideologically as well as historically.  At the level of theory, Hegel already expressed deep ambivalence toward public opinion and proposed an alternative system of corporate representation in his legislative assembly.  His interpretation of civil society as a “system of [conflicting] needs” was also taken over by Marx in the latter’s identification of civil [‘buergerliche’ or bourgeois] society with commercial society and the exclusive pursuit of individual self-interest.  In liberal theory as well, the idea of the public sphere is often restricted to the formal guarantee of a limited set of civil and political rights.

As an historical phenomenon, the bourgeois public sphere suffered an equally unfortunate fate.  Rather than providing a basis for the expansion of political and civil liberties to include all members of the demos and the elimination of those social inequalities that restricted its scope, its normative claims retreated even further from empirical reality.  In connection with what he describes as the “refeudalization” of civil society that began during the latter part of the nineteenth century, Habermas traces the commercialization of civil society, the bureaucratization of political and non-political authority, and the growth of a manipulative and propagandistic mass media.  A “repoliticized” social sphere erodes the crucial distinction between state and society that is a necessary social condition for the bourgeois public sphere.  In its place arose a society oriented largely to consumption and a politics based on the competition and bargaining between interest groups.  Although Habermas never abandoned the normative (and partly utopian) claims expressed in the bourgeois ideal, the conclusion of STPS at most expressed only a cautious optimism about the possibility for a renewed public sphere under the altered conditions of late capitalist society.  More often it seemed to echo some of the darker themes of his senior colleagues in Frankfurt, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in their earlier writings on the “culture industry” and “totally administered society”.

STPS had a large and interdisciplinary impact, including within the emerging field of media studies.  This is evident in the range of essays in a volume that accompanied the English translation of STPS in 1989 (Calhoun). However, the book also encountered various criticisms.  One set of criticisms, in large part from the left, argued that Habermas offered a highly idealized description of the bourgeois public sphere that overlooked its specific social (and exclusionary) conditions and that disregarded counter-publics that arose directly in response to it (e.g., the proletarian public sphere).  Others found his description of the decline of the public sphere unduly pessimistic.  A second line of criticism was that Habermas relied on a model of immanent critique that was inadequate for a number of reasons.  Habermas himself later acknowledged its limits in his remark that “bourgeois consciousness had become cynical” (Habermas 1979, 97):  pointing out the gap between ideal and reality was no longer sufficient since one might simply choose to ignore it.

Much of Habermas’s subsequent writings can be read as an attempt to address these concerns either directly or indirectly.  For example, he went on to argue that, despite its historical limitations, the bourgeois public sphere implicitly contained the possibility for self-reflection and critique and so also to become more inclusive.   He also acknowledged that his outline of the decline of the public sphere may have been too harsh (Calhoun, 430).  More importantly, his turn to the study of language (and ‘symbolic orders’ or culture, more generally) was motivated in large part by the desire to identify more robust normative resources to address the second criticism.  This interest finally culminated in his theory of communicative action that offered an account of modernity much richer than simply the triumph of ‘instrumental rationality’ and spread of capitalism into all domains of social life (recall Marx’s own “all that’s solid melts into air”).  As he already formulated it in his 1965 inaugural lecture in Frankfurt: “The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy for it can be apprehended a priori.  What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language.  Through its structure autonomy and responsibility are posited for us” (Habermas 1971, 314).  Though he later conceded that his thesis had been rather dramatically expressed, he continued to insist on its basic truth.  By the early 1970s—and especially in his 1976 essay “What is Universal Pragmatics?” (in Habermas 1979)—Habermas makes explicit the argumentative strategy that will henceforth frame his work.  Drawing especially upon the theory of speech acts proposed by Austin and Searle, Habermas argues that the resources for normative criticism are built into the very structure of language use since illocutionary acts—speech acts such as asserting, promising, or requesting—presuppose that the addressee is “free” to respond to the claims raised in such acts on the basis of her own reasons.  When, for example, I sincerely promise to meet someone at the café at noon I tacitly presuppose that she has the capacity to respond.  She can acknowledge my promise and make her plans accordingly; but she can also (for any number of reasons) decline from undertaking the commitments that such an acknowledgment would bring about.  She might equally question my ability to keep the promise (given my other obligations) or even my sincerity in making it.  In any event, in making a promise (or in performing any number of basic illocutionary acts) the speaker implicitly attributes a normative status to the addressee and, in acknowledging the speech act offer, the addressee also locates herself (and the speaker) within a shared normative structure.  It would contradict the very meaning or “illocutionary force” of such speech acts if the capacity of the addressee to respond on the basis of her own reasons were denied.   Though this might seem like a quite narrow foothold, for Habermas it is crucial in that the normative structure introduced with illocutionary acts cannot be easily dismissed.  More generally, this normative structure indicates what distinguishes the social sciences from the natural sciences and explains why the former cannot be entirely replaced by the latter (or by a wholly ‘objectivating’ perspective).  Indeed, as he argued throughout his career, the natural sciences themselves presuppose such a normative structure (along with its ties to a hermeneutic or interpretive approach) for their own possibility for reflective inquiry and communication.

The concept of communicative action is unquestionably the most basic concept in Habermas’s developed philosophical position but it is a concept that underwent revisions as he struggled to give it shape.  Its basic idea, though, is relatively straightforward even if it has slightly different connotations in different contexts.   At one level, it is Habermas’s own preferred way to refer to what others have called the “manifest image” and “space of reasons” (Sellars):  it refers to the folk-psychological understanding that humans can respond to and act on the basis of reasons or considered judgments and are not simply propelled by the strongest motive or desire.  As importantly, however, the concept of communicative action captures Habermas conviction that one’s status as a person is in an important sense social or intersubjective.  The individual capacity to act for reasons is rooted in the normative structure associated with our capacity for linguistic communication just described—that is, in the shared structure of illocutionary acts.  One might even say, in a manner intended to recall Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, that one’s status as an individual accountable and responsible agent—that is, as “free”—is crucially dependent upon and coeval with the recognition of others as similarly situated (and vice-versa).

Of course, even this intersubjective or “recognitional” understanding is still extremely thin.  It is the minimal notion of a person or agent as someone who occupies the normative status of accepting or rejecting the claims raised in various types of speech acts.  What gives the notion of communicative action more character or depth is Habermas’s further claim that such action always occurs within the lifeworld where much more is assumed and taken for granted (Habermas 1987, 126).   Communicative action presupposes “thick” contexts and takes place against a background of innumerable shared norms, expectations and habits that are in play.  In fact, it is often only when these shared norms and expectations begin to break down or are called into question that the “rational potential” built into illocutionary acts is more explicitly drawn upon—the demand, that is, to provide reasons for the claims becomes more explicit and comes to depend less upon previously taken-for-granted background certainties. Nonetheless central to Habermas’s basic thesis about communicative action is that even in our most mundane or everyday social interactions—as shot through as they also always are with various both unquestioned assumptions and forms of social power and domination—this “manifest image” of humans as accountable and responsible is present or, as he also puts it, “counterfactually presupposed”.

This is only a brief outline of Habermas’s concept of communicative action.  It is, to repeat, closely connected to his own construal of the “manifest image” of the person and his claim that, however real and deep the conflict with a scientific or naturalistic description of the world may be, the latter presupposes the former and so cannot completely displace it—at least not without so radically altering our understanding of ourselves that we cannot coherently (or rationally) imagine what living in that world would be like.   Habermas’s position is at this point quite close to P. F. Strawson’s claim in “Freedom and Resentment” that we cannot easily imagine a world in which the practice of praise and blame (and the reactive attitudes on which it is based) are absent.  This is not surprising since, for both Strawson and Habermas, the “manifest image” (with its notion of accountable agency and the practice of praise and blame) is supported and sustained by a complex network of interpersonal relationships or structures of intersubjective recognition that in turn make it possible for us to describe that image as “rational”.  For Habermas, though, this “reconstruction” of the normative structure implicit in ordinary communication also serves to secure the basis for immanent critique.

The concept of communicative action informs other argumentative strategies in his mature works and relevant for his analysis of the critical role of the public sphere.  For example, in The Theory of Communicative Action he explicitly introduces it in conjunction with the notion of the lifeworld in order to provide an alternative to the interpretation of social rationalization found in both Max Weber and in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Modern “rational” societies need not inevitably, through the spread of instrumental reason, culminate in an “iron cage” (Weber) or in a “totally administered society” (Adorno and Horkheimer).  Rather, the process of social rationalization may so far have been extremely one-sided but it nonetheless contains possibilities for the development of more rational forms of social organization that make use of the resources of communicative action.  The analysis of communicative action is also at the basis of his own constructivist reading of a discourse ethics and it figures prominently in Between Facts and Norms and his account of deliberative politics, where the task is to see how a communicative power generated within the free associations of civil society (that is, within institutions of the lifeworld) can be channeled in ways to influence the formal decisionmaking processes and exercise a rationalizing influence on administrative power.  Finally, as Habermas argues in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, many criticisms of “Western reason” and its instrumentalizing effects are based on a failure to distinguish between the communicative reason connected with communicative action and communicative power and the instrumental and functionalist reason that has often been more visible in the organization of societies.

After almost 30 years Habermas returned directly the topic of the public sphere in Between Facts and Norms [BFN], his major contribution to legal and political theory.   A central aim of this work is to provide an alternative to standard accounts of the legitimacy of constitutional democracy.  Standard accounts appeal either to a natural (“higher”) law (or ‘thick’ concept of the rule of law) or to legal positivism (or ‘thin’ concept of the rule of law).  His alternative is to make the legitimacy of law depend on a specific rendering of the democratic process—one in which, as he puts it the Preface, “the rule of law cannot be had or maintained without radical democracy” (xlii). This conception of democracy is itself analyzed in connection with a “two-track” model that distinguishes between the formal processes of decision-making (roughly what we call ‘government’) and the informal processes of opinion-formation identified with the public sphere.  Thus, just as he had argued in STPS the public sphere remains a central if limited component to his account of political legitimacy.   Habermas’s opening remark about the relationship between the rule of law and radical democracy also points to a second central theme of BFN—namely, the co-originality (or mutual dependence) of private and public autonomy.  A third important feature of BFN not found in STPS is a “procedural” paradigm of law that he juxtaposes to a “liberal” and “social welfare” paradigm (more on these further two themes below).

Of course, it will readily be asked what it is about his specific rendering of the democratic process that provides for political legitimacy.  Somewhat surprisingly, Habermas argues that it is not primarily the more conventional claim that this process best tracks or expresses the will of the people or even the will of the majority.  Rather, the source of legitimacy for him is the expectation that a specific institutional design will produce outcomes that are rational or reasonable (448; 453; 457).  Importantly this formulation also subtly shifts the question of legitimacy away from a focus on equal participation and/or representation to the production of (public) reasons in the ‘informal’ public sphere and their ability to shape or inform the decisions of the ‘formal’ institutions of legislation and administration.   In other words, like some other epistemic accounts of democracy, it is the “fallible presumption” that decisions are reasonable or rational rather than the extent of actual citizen participation that crucially determines the (degree of) legitimacy.   This focus on the generation of public reasons also underscores again the centrality of his ‘two-track’ model for his account of legitimacy. This model has, I believe, not been sufficiently appreciated and its more radical character has been overlooked.   While his view has some similarities with Bruce Ackerman’s dualist account in We, the People, what is central to his view of democracy is whether institutions have been designed to ensure that (good) reasons are generated by the public and that they are actually able to influence decision-making.  This can and should take place both during the operation of ‘normal’ politics and on those occasions when ‘the people’ are mobilized and exercise a more direct and ‘episodic’ influence.  The further requirements of inclusion and equal participation are themselves understood to be conditions for the production of public reasons (299).  On what he calls this ‘transmission belt’ model (448), the flow of reasons must be from within the public sphere of ‘reasoning citizens’ into the formal institutions of lawmaking and not the reverse and the formation of public opinion must not itself be simply a function of external social power.

The claim that the rule of law cannot be had or maintained without radical democracy (or a vibrant public sphere) is also reflected in a second central theme of BFN, what he calls the co-originality of private and public autonomy.  This claim of mutual reciprocity is itself not new Habermas.  Contrary to Isaiah Berlin’s influential interpretation which prioritizes private over public autonomy, Benjamin Constant arguably defends co-originality in his influential 1819 essay “On the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns.”   More recent versions of it have been endorsed by John Rawls (in his “Reply to Habermas”) as well as by Danielle Allen (in Justice by Means of Democracy).   What is unique is Habermas’s specific argument for it which proceeds in two broad steps.  First, Habermas introduces private autonomy (or modern law or the ‘legal form’) as a functional requirement for those who in complex and structurally differentiated societies seek a means to regulate their collective life.   That is, he does not rely on a normative argument (as does, for example, H. L.  A. Hart in his argument for a natural right to liberty) but points to a social fact or condition of modern societies.  As a consequence of societal rationalization (as presented in TCA) there is no plausible alternative to modern law for social coordination and integration.  Moreover, while it should be possible for citizens to comply with the law for their own moral reasons, there is no generally recognized higher norm or authority that could impose such an obligation—not even the principle of universalizability presented in Habermas’s own discourse ethics.  This too is a function of modernization (the differentiation of value spheres) and pluralism.   In a second step (as just indicated) law or the legal form (i.e., private autonomy) “cannot be had or maintained” without public autonomy (i.e., radical democracy).  Since both steps are often taken to be at odds with the liberal tradition, let me offer a few more remarks in the hope of making them at least slightly more attractive.

“Private autonomy” as Habermas understands it is distinct from related ideas of personal or ethical autonomy that can be found in much recent literature.   Rather, for Habermas, it refers initially to the individual or ‘subjective’ rights generally associated with ‘principles of legality’ or the rule of law.   He argues primarily on historical grounds that this minimal notion of private autonomy also includes the claim to ‘treat equals equally’ and the guarantee of equal liberties for all (458; 134-5)—and so, again, ideas contained in most understandings of the rule of law.  Historically these liberties have been primarily understood as negative rights to be ‘left alone’ or ‘not dominated by the will of another’ to determine one’s life as one sees fit.  Additionally, with reference to his own theoretical framework, Habermas further describes this limited notion of private autonomy as a right to be relieved from the obligations implicit in communicative action—the right to say ‘no’—as this has been especially enabled by positive law.   He at times also refers to this “no saying” as the “anarchistic core” of communicative freedom (xl; 149) and elsewhere connects it to a democratic defense of civil disobedience.    Although this understanding extends beyond the more restricted notion of the ‘subjective liberties’ associated with the legal form and rule of law it still falls considerably short of a substantive notion of moral or ethical autonomy (as found, for example, in Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom).

In the second (equally controversial) step, Habermas argues that this idea of private autonomy requires public autonomy (no rule of law without radical democracy).  This is so for at least two reasons.  First, the idea of private autonomy is substantially empty or indeterminate.  Even what it means to treat like cases equally (or determine who counts as an equal) is not something that is simply given or “self-evident”.  The indeterminacy of ‘private autonomy’ must be filled in or ‘saturated’ by the insights gained through public deliberation (450).  This claim need not deny that much can be learned about the ‘subjective’ liberties from tradition and past experience.  But it does mean that neither of these sources are infallible guides or that new insights cannot modify our previous understanding of them.  Second, the claim that private autonomy requires public autonomy is however more than an empirical or historical claim.  It is rather the stronger claim that private autonomy normatively and even conceptually depends on public autonomy (449).  Again, as I understand it, this means that the subjective rights that form the content of modern law (or the ‘legal form’) are not self-evident and certainly not limited to what can derived through analysis from any independent concept of self-ownership, natural liberty or even legal subjectivity.  Rather they must be elaborated or developed in connection with an equally basic idea of public autonomy (or democracy).   Interestingly enough, support for this claim can also be found in recent discussions that the rule of law entails a ‘theatre of debate’ (Ronald Dworkin) and thus that it does not refer so much to any specific individual liberties as it does to a set of public deliberative procedures as conditions and ‘assurances’ for those liberties.  It is an “essentially contested” concept that requires these public procedures (i. e., democracy) to settle (fallibly) its content.   Conversely, however, those procedures themselves presuppose the existence of subjective liberties if there is to be any presumption that their outcomes will be rational or reasonable.  Thus, however paradoxical at a certain level of abstraction, private and public autonomy presuppose one another (see Frank Michelman for more on this paradox).

In the central normative chapter of BFN Habermas introduces his distinctive “discourse” argument for co-originality.  Private autonomy (roughly,  system of rights) and public autonomy (roughly, the democratic principle) arise from the “interpenetration” of his principle of discourse with the legal form (as outlined above). The discourse principle (or Principle D) is not a moral principle (not even his Principle U or universalizability principle that structures moral discourses) but rather a prior or more basic action norm derived from the limited presuppositions of (communicative) action:  Implicit in communicative action—so, as noted above, in most social interactions—is an assumption that when norms are challenged or contested by participants they require a reasoned justification.   Habermas’s argument is that when this abstract principle is brought to bear on the legal form it generates the ‘system of rights’ and the democratic principle (121).   This “discourse theoretic” derivation of the two principles is then finally summarized by him in connection with the basic question underlying the idea of the social contract:  what rights must citizens who view themselves as free and equal confer on one another if they want legitimately to regulate the interactions by means of positive law (122; 453).  In this manner Habermas hopes to have provided an alternative to social contract theories that rely on the tradition of rational natural law (including Kant).  It reconciles private autonomy (basic liberties or the rule of law) and public autonomy (popular sovereignty) in a way that avoids subordination to a ‘higher’ moral principle, on the one hand, and more ‘decisionistic’ readings of the democratic principle (or sovereignty) on the other.

By way of conclusion, a third theme in BFN is Habermas’s introduction of a “procedural” paradigm of law that emphasizes an ongoing ‘dialectic of legal and factual equality’. In the final chapter of BFN Habermas introduces a ‘procedural’ legal paradigm in contrast to the liberal and social-welfare paradigms.  Drawing upon the influential work of Thomas Kuhn on the role of paradigms in explaining scientific change, Habermas describes a legal paradigm as an “implicit image of society” and its relation to law that shapes legal reasoning.   Reference to a paradigm helps explain how the courts and others, despite appeal to the very same constitution and basic rights, draw very different conclusions. The contrast between a liberal and social-welfare paradigm also helps to clarify the long transition from formal to material law beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and much discussed in legal literature.  Roughly, the shift reflects a gradual change in the understanding of law’s role from the protection of individual negative rights of the person, property and contract to its role in securing the wider social conditions for individual welfare.   What is arguably more controversial is Habermas’s own proposal for a new ‘procedural’ paradigm to replace its predecessors.  To be sure, the idea of a procedural paradigm is already anticipated in discussions about ‘responsive’ and ‘reflexive’ law prominent in the 1980s.   But in that context reference to paradigms is primarily used to explain current or past practices rather than, as in Habermas’s case, a normative proposal for how to move forward.  In this case, the procedural paradigm is a proposal for a ‘higher-order’ or ‘reflective’ understanding of law within the community of free and equal legal consociates.  In fact, Habermas again explicitly invokes the idea of co-originality as an alternative to the overemphasis on private autonomy in each of the other two paradigms.  His procedural paradigm thus leads once again directly to public and private autonomy and, more broadly, to see the legal enactment of the entire ‘system of rights’ as part of “the ongoing process of constitution making” (410).

Some critics have worried whether there is anything especially radical or even new with his procedural paradigm.   While it is true that Habermas at times describes this paradigm as a more reflective and critical use of its two predecessors, this is not the only thing he says about it.  The liberal paradigm emphasizes the negative liberties that leave citizens free to pursue their own interests (especially within the market), while the second (social-welfare) paradigm seeks to compensate for the unequal opportunities and social conditions of all citizens (especially regarding those negative liberties).  Both therefore suffer from what he calls a “productivist” image of capitalist society still focused primarily on negative liberties and continuous growth (407).  By contrast, the procedural paradigm of law embraces the one dogmatic core of (both public and private) autonomy (445).  As importantly, Habermas explicitly aligns his procedural paradigm with contemporary feminist criticisms of the law.  The ‘dialectic of legal and factual equality’ points not only to the unequal distribution of goods but more importantly to the unequal opportunities of different members of society to participate in society and in the process of defining the terms of their individual and collective lives.  The feminist idea of ‘making difference costless’ (Deborah Rhode) has been a central feature of this feminist critique.   In Between Naturalism and Religion and subsequent essays he uses the more traditional idea of religious toleration to argue for a more expansive notion of political inclusion for all (reasonable) “ethical” conceptions of the good and a critique of various forms of misrecognition.   This is a more radical basis of criticism—tied again to co-originality—than many of his critics have recognized.  It informs not only the critique of distributive inequalities but also calls for the equal recognition of various disadvantaged groups.   It also resonates with more recent feminist calls for an end to all forms of discrimination based on unequal recognition and inclusion (Moreau) as well as calls for a more radical change to social and economic institutions than could be supported by the other legal paradigms.    For better or worse, I believe that this reading of the procedural paradigm also locates Habermas’s contribution at the center of current debates about the implications of identity politics and the fate of DEI.

One final line of criticism worth noting returns to Habermas’s heavy reliance on so-called “weak publics” or the informal institutions of the public sphere as the major source of democratic innovation and renewal.  Whereas some regard it as his major contribution to democracy, others have expressed reservations about its limits (see Abromeit, et al.).   As Habermas acknowledged in one of his last essays on the topic, for this model to have any plausibility there must be a “recognizable connection” between governmental policies and the concerns and issues voiced by citizens in the public sphere (Habermas 2023, 19).   But it is just this connection that has been called into question by the rise of the “digitized” and platform-based media based on profit and no longer tethered to traditional journalistic norms and practices.  If public opinion is more a function of social media controlled by social powers than it is the result of the flow of critical and attuned information about what is in the citizens’ common interest, the core of Habermas’s model of democracy collapses.   Habermas was certainly aware of this concern and in A New Structural Transformation he continued to offer some reasons for optimism.   But critics worry whether his diagnosis and/or his proposed cures are sufficient.  What can at least be said is that his final writings on the public sphere continue to be at the center of current debates about deliberative democracy.   These debates include not only reflection on the quality of voter opinion and possible remedies to address it, but also about the role of experts in a democracy and, in Habermas’s specific case, what it might mean for the formation of public opinion to depend less on any individual competence than on “subjectless” forms of communication as a whole (136, 486).  Further, and more concretely, the question of whether this new media can be harnessed and appropriately regulated for democratic ends or whether it contributes to a fragmented and easily manipulated public will greatly determine the appeal and feasibility of Habermas’s project (see essays in Bernholz, et al., especially by Joshua Cohen and Archon Fung).

References:

Abromeit, John et al., eds.  2025.  Critical encounters with Habermas’s political and legal theory.   Leiden:  Brill.

Allen, Danielle.  2023.  Justice by means of Democracy.  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press.

Bernholz, Lucy, et al.  2021.  Digital Technology and Democratic Theory.  Chicago:  University of Chicago.

Calhoun, Craig, ed.  1992.  Habermas and the Public Sphere.  Cambridge:  MIT Press.

Habermas, J.  1971.  Knowledge and Human Interests.  Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J.  1979.  Communication and the Evolution of Society.  Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J.  1984/1987.  The Theory of Communicative Action., v. 1 & 2.  Cambridge:  MIT Press.

Habermas, J.  1985.  The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.  Cambridge:  MIT Press.

Habermas, J.  1996.  Between Facts and Norms.  Cambridge:  MIT Press.

Habermas, J.  2008.  Between Naturalism and Religion.  Cambridge:  Polity Press.

Habermas, J.  2023.  A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics.  Cambridge:  Polity Press.

Kant, I.  1970.  “What is Enlightenment?” in H. Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings.  New York: Cambridge University Press.

Michelman, Frank. 1998.  “Constitutional Authorship” in Larry Alexander (ed) Constitutionalism.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 64-98.

Moreau, Sophia.  2020.  Faces of Inequality.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Rhode, Deborah.  1989.  Justice and Gender.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press.

Sellars, Wilfrid.  1963.  “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” in Science, Perception and Reality.  New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.