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484  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

 Jürgen haBermaS (1929– ): a BiographiCal SketCh

Jürgen Habermas was born in Dusseldorf, Germany, in 1929. He grew up in the small town of Gummersbach, where his father, a successful businessman, was the head of the local chamber of industry and commerce. Ten years old at the outbreak of World War II, Haber- mas served in the Hitler Youth, a compulsory organization that trained young boys for military service and young girls for motherhood. With the defeat of Germany and fall of Nazism, however, Habermas was forced to confront the atrocities committed under the Nazis’ reign of terror. Horrified by the genocide carried out under Hitler’s rule, Habermas viewed the end of the war as “a liberation, both historical and personal,” as he came to real- ize that “it was a politically criminal system in which we lived” (interview, cited in Horster 1992:78–79).

Between 1949 and 1954, Habermas studied philosophy, history, and psychology at the universities of Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn. In 1953, he published a provocative critique of the influential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) that questioned how Heidegger’s allegiance to the Nazi effort shaped his development of existential philosophy (Lalonde 1999:37, 38). The following year, he completed his dissertation, “The Absolute in History,” on the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775–1854), a renowned German idealist phi- losopher. Toward the end of his studies, Habermas turned his attention to the writings of Marx and developed a fervent interest in the work associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Greatly influenced by Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (see Chapter 3), Habermas served as Adorno’s assistant from 1956 to 1959 at the Institute for Social Research, which by then had relocated to Frankfurt, Germany.

Despite his interests in critical theory, Habermas’s intellectual position began to shift away from key tenets espoused by his mentors. He was particularly disillusioned by the earlier critical theorists’ rejection of the public sphere of debate as a possible arena for democratic, progressive change and their despairing view of modern society more gener- ally. In 1959, Habermas left the Institute and began a second doctorate (“Habilitation”) at the University of Marburg. The following year, he joined the faculty at the University of Heidelberg, where he served as a professor of philosophy until 1964. He then returned to Frankfurt as professor of philosophy and sociology. He would eventually leave Frankfurt after disagreements with the student protest movement over what he believed to be its politically and intellectually extremist positions. Between 1971 and 1981, he lived in Starnberg, Bavaria, where he served as director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World. During this time, he wrote several works that were highly acclaimed, including Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) and Legitimation Crisis (1973). In 1980, Habermas won the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt, and in 1982 he was named Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy in Heidelberg. That same year, he accepted a professorship at the University of Frankfurt, where he remained until his retirement in 1994.

Considered one of Europe’s most important public intellectuals and described by Der Spiegel magazine as “the most intellectually powerful” philosopher in Germany (Hor- ster 1992:3), Habermas is read not only by sociologists, philosophers, and political scientists, but also by politicians throughout the world. His most important works, The Theory of Communicative Action, v. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1981) and The Theory of Communicative Action, v. 2: Lifeworld and System (1981), continue to inspire democratic activists who seek to increase the scope and power of the public sphere.

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haBermaS’S intelleCtual influenCeS and Core ideaS 

Jürgen Habermas is commonly regarded as one of sociology’s greatest synthetic thinkers (McCarthy 1978). He is also the most celebrated inheritor of the tradition of thought developed by the Frankfurt School (Kellner 2000; McCarthy 1978; Seidman 1989). As Habermas was a student of two of the School’s founders—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (see Chapter 3)—his work is centrally informed by critical the- ory and the issues with which its leading figures grappled, particularly their inquiries into the role of reason in promoting a free and just society. However, Habermas’s influences run much deeper into German intellectual history, for, like the critical theorists, he draws on the legacy of German Enlightenment thinkers whose roots date back to the eighteenth century. Incorporating the insights of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he fashions a contemporary approach to the emancipatory project of social philoso- phy. This project envisions the creation of a social order in which reason and rational- ity provide the pathway for establishing economic equality, political democracy, and the liberation of the individual from systems of domination. These themes form the core of Habermas’s own theoretical perspective, a perspective that, in addition to Marxist-inspired writers, incorporates the insights of a range of additional scholars including Weber, Durkheim, Mead, Husserl, Schutz, and Parsons, as well as linguistic philosophers and developmental psychologists.

Like Weber and the Frankfurt School theorists, Habermas (1981) contends that the modern world is characterized by increasing instrumental rationalization—that is, by the spread of methodical procedures and calculable rules into more and more domains of social and personal life. However, whereas the earlier critical theorists saw rational- ization leading only to the corruption of the human spirit and the decay of civilization, Habermas finds modernity yielding mixed results. For while it is true that the possi- bilities for democracy and human emancipation have been distorted in modern socie- ties, modernity has also brought the rule of law, the expansion of political and civil rights, and, if not the full realization of democracy, at least the hallowing of democratic principles of government. Moreover, rationalizing processes have led to advances in a variety of fields, from medical sciences and food production to architecture and the arts. Nevertheless, the growth of bureaucratic structures of social organization, complex political processes, sophisticated economic systems, and rationalized means of mass- mediated communication has not been without its drawbacks. It is precisely this duality embodied in the rationalization of society—both facilitating and restricting the develop- ment of human knowledge, democratic organization, and ultimately liberation—that Habermas seeks to address.

In stark contrast to the Frankfurt School theorists, whose antimodernist stance and loss of faith in reason led them to abandon Marx’s utopian commitment to emancipation, Haber- mas holds out great hope for the power of reason to combat the dehumanizing consequences stemming from the rationalization of society. His rekindled utopian vision, however, does not mark a return to “orthodox” Marxism’s emphasis on capitalism as the primary cause for humanity’s unfreedom. Instead, drawing from phenomenology, Habermas reconstructs Marxism to examine the intersubjective and normative dimensions of social life that Marx had largely ignored. For according to Habermas, it is not the form of economic or material reproduction of society (the relationship between individuals and their physical environ- ment) but, rather, the form of its symbolic reproduction (processes of socialization, identity formation, and social integration) that poses the greatest threat to freedom and progress in modern society.

486  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA2 � SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

Figure 9.2 The Domains of Lifeworld and System

Lifeworld

Private sphere Public sphere

Family Media/Open spaces

System

State (power) Economy (money)

Worker/ConsumerCitizen/Client

Lifeworld and System Habermas’s efforts to chart the historical development of societies and the course for

emancipation begins with his discussion of the lifeworld and system. Drawing from and extending the work of Husserl and Schutz (see Chapter 6), Habermas conceives of the life- world as a prereflexive framework of background assumptions, a “network of shared mean- ings that individuals draw from to construct identities, to negotiate situational definitions, or to create social solidarity” (Seidman 1989:18). It consists of taken-for-granted cultural know-how, customs, and norms through which we are able to construct common under- standings of our social world. In addition, the lifeworld provides for the socialization of society’s members and the internalization of the norms and values essential to the stability of the social order.

The lifeworld serves as the backdrop for social integration, identity formation, and the construction of meaning in two domains: the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of open civic debate (see Figure 9.2). (We address the issue of the public sphere more fully later in this chapter.) Interaction within these domains is mediated through language and the development of shared meanings that in turn serves to reinforce or challenge the legitimacy of existing social norms and values.

A key component of modern societies, however, is the ongoing rationalization of the lifeworld in which the discourses regarding “truth, goodness, and beauty” are differentiated into separate spheres of knowledge (Seidman 1989:24). Rationalization produces a greater potential to question our actions and the actions of others and to question more generally the conditions of the world around us. In the process, highly abstract concepts like democracy, equality, freedom, and universal rights circulate in debates that, in turn, create the conditions for a consensual understanding of the forces that shape social life.

Habermas maintains that his notion of the lifeworld helps correct Marx’s reductive, one- sided theory of society. According to Habermas, Marx and his successors failed to recognize the significance of the symbolic and communicative domains of society, opting instead to emphasize the role of economic production and property relations both in generating

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conditions of exploitation and in sparking the eventual communist revolution. Nevertheless, to avoid developing his own one-sided, and thus incomplete, theory, Habermas (1981/1984, 1981/1987) introduces the notion of the “system” to address some of the concerns that Marx had earlier studied. The system comprises a society’s political and economic structures that are responsible for the organization of power relations and the production and distribution of material resources. As societies evolve, both the state and the economy develop their own formal structure and mechanisms for self-organization. Habermas calls these organizational mechanisms steering media and argues that two primary forms emerge: power and money. As shown in Figure 9.2, while the state is organized around the distribution of power, the economy is organized around the circulation of money. What makes both power and money unique is that they are abstract, “delinguistified” media; they operate according to a goal- oriented, instrumental logic that lies outside of language and norm-confirming, consensus- producing debate.

In modern societies, individuals are related to the system in their roles as formal citizens and clients of the state and as economic workers and consumers. To the extent that the state (power) and the economy (money) shape social relations, they do so without the benefit of negotiated, consensual understandings of their impact on indi- viduals and the broader society. This is because such understandings are made possible only through interactions that are grounded in the norm- and value-rich environment of the lifeworld. That power and money are impersonal, “meaningless” steering media without normative value is of crucial significance both for the maintenance of social stability and for the emancipation of individuals from domination. In advanced capital- ist societies, families are linked to the economy through the medium of money: mon- etary wages are paid for work, which are then spent to consume goods and services. At no point during this process do families exercise significant control over the terms of these exchanges. Meanwhile, individuals are related to the state less as informed citi- zens capable of effectively influencing political decisions than as “clients” who use the services (education, health care, social security, etc.) it provides. This client relation is reinforced as the state enters into more domains that formerly were free from political interference. Not only does the state intervene in the economy to minimize destabiliz- ing fluctuations in the market (e.g., by creating a public sector or raising interest rates), but it also increasingly penetrates into private matters ordinarily addressed in the life- world. The state now regulates virtually every aspect of personal “choice,” from mar- riage and biological reproduction to euthanasia.

In exchange for the goods and services purchased in the economy and the benefits provided by the state, individuals offer their obedience to the system. Mass loyalty and compliance are thus secured at the cost of forestalling genuine democratic participation in decisions that profoundly affect the most fundamental aspects of one’s life. However, because loyalty and compliance can never be completely ensured, “legitimation crises” are endemic to the system. These crises are prone to erupt when the class biases of the political system are revealed. While the state is charged with promoting the general well-being of all its citizens, it often effects policies that further the interests of only the most privileged (for example, the financial reform bill recently signed into law); indeed, it must do so to ensure the continued growth of the economy. Nevertheless, such policies run counter to the demo- cratic principles of egalitarianism underlying the political system, principles that politicians and state bureaucrats must uphold in order to confer legitimacy on state actions. To avoid such crises, the state provides its clients with material rewards in the form of various social welfare programs such as minimum wage increases, unemployment benefits, and Social Security. And by restricting the political participation of citizens to periodic voting, state

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officials are afforded “substantial freedom from public accountability” while securing the legitimacy of the state (Seidman 1989:21, 22).

This dynamic is vividly expressed in two current areas of government policy. First, the ongoing economic crisis, the worst in the country since the Great Depression, has left a record high of more than 14 million workers unemployed as of mid-2010. Moreover, many of those still employed are left with no choice but to accept steep cuts in pay and benefits, while federal, state, and local budgets for public programs such as education and health care are being dramatically reduced. The principal causes of the economic crisis lie in the unscrupulous investment and accounting practices of the nation’s major banks and investment firms. To stem the tide of the fallout and prevent what some observers allege would be a complete collapse of the nation’s (and the world’s) economy, the government has intervened in the form of loaning billions of taxpayer dollars to the very financial institutions that are largely responsible for creating the crisis, with little oversight for how the funds will be used. The actions of government officials, which they claimed to have been “necessary,” have nevertheless sparked public uproar because the bailout of Wall Street has come at the expense of Main Street. The bailout has thus unambiguously exposed the class bias of government policy, since the typical taxpaying citizen has seen little relief from the fragility of her own economic situation. That these actions have ignited a legitimation crisis is made visible by the numerous public protests that have occurred in the wake of the government’s actions. Potentially intensifying this crisis is the “return to normalcy” within the financial industry aided by elected federal officials who refused to pass stringent regulatory policies that would prevent the use of banking and investment practices that could precipitate another collapse. Meanwhile, executive bonuses at firms such as Goldman Sachs have quickly returned to their precrisis, multi- million-dollar level, despite the fact that the firms’ solvency is due solely to the massive infusion of taxpayers’ funds—taxpayers who continue to face economic hardships. To the degree that democratic governments are premised on fostering the well-being of all their citizens, such actions certainly jeopardize their legitimacy.

As Habermas notes, states seek to avoid or mitigate legitimation crises by providing their “clients” with material rewards in the form of social programs. The recent health- care reform debate can be viewed as a stage on which an attempt to “buy” the public’s loyalty was played out. While it is in the interest of all government officials to secure the obedience of the citizenry, efforts to expand healthcare coverage, nevertheless, were opposed by many members of Congress as well as by a health insurance industry that would lose billions of dollars in profits if a wholesale overhaul of the system (in the form of establishing single-payer universal care or a public health insurance option) was enacted. With the passage of the healthcare reform bill it is clear that a dramatic shift away from a for-profit healthcare model will not occur, thus blunting the reform’s potential to buttress the state’s legitimacy. Moreover, during the debate, press reports disclosed the efforts of lobbyists for the insurance industry to prevent significant reform, efforts that included making campaign contributions to sympathetic lawmakers, publishing industry reports that deceptively inflated the costs of healthcare reform, and taking an active role in writing proposed healthcare legislation. Their success in thwart- ing reform not only compromises the state’s legitimacy, but also demonstrates the encroachment of the steering media of money and power into the essential lifeworld requirement to advance democratic, normatively sanctioned debate.

The relationship between lifeworld and system represents for Habermas the crucial dynamic shaping the development of human society. Although the system has its origins in the lifeworld, highly differentiated and complex societies have developed a set of emergent structures that become increasingly segmented from the communicative and

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integrative processes of the lifeworld. In smaller and less-differentiated societies, the system and the lifeworld are closely coupled in a tight, mutual interrelationship. In such societies, the weight of tradition presents its members with a world that is unquestioned. Marriage arrangements, productive tasks, and the distribution of wealth and power con- front members as natural and unchanging conditions of social life. However, as socie- ties become larger and more complex, system and lifeworld begin to grow increasingly detached. Economic and political institutions become functionally independent of kin- ship structures that previously provided the basis for societal organization (Seidman 1989:19). On the one hand, this “uncoupling” is an essential condition for the develop- ment of modern societies and the greater potential for individual freedom they offer. It enables societies to more efficiently organize and control their productive and adminis- trative requirements. Moreover, with the growing rationalization of the lifeworld, indi- viduals come to possess the symbolic resources enabling them to question the legiti- macy of the existing social conditions and to demand that they be explicitly justified according to shared principles and standards for action. Indeed, for Habermas, the rationalization of the lifeworld is the “pacesetter” of social evolution.

On the other hand, as the complexity, power, and differentiation of the system grows, it eventually becomes sealed off from the lifeworld and ultimately comes to engulf it. In one of his more famous expressions, Habermas (1981/1987) describes this process as the colonization of the lifeworld. In this process, system steering media (money and power) and technical/instrumental logic come to replace the consensual negotiation of shared meanings as the foundation for social integration and the repro- duction of the lifeworld. The result is a “totally administered” society in which social relationships are increasingly mediated by power and money, and the interpersonal debates and discussions within the lifeworld come to have less and less impact on the constitution of the system. (The examples above concerning the economic crisis and healthcare reform speak to this development.) Thus, while modern societies have wit- nessed a phenomenal expansion of productive capacity and material wealth, they have yet to fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment. To more fully understand Habermas’s ambivalent view of modernity, we must explore his conception of rationality. It is to this task that we now turn.

Habermas and Rational Action Like that of the critical theorists, Habermas’s work is grounded in an investigation of the

increasing rationalization of society, a subject first explored by Max Weber. Habermas’s dis- cussion of modern forms of rationality parallels the “moments of reason” outlined by Weber. To Weber’s three moments of reason—science, law, and art—Habermas posits three comple- mentary modes of rationality—instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive—that individuals use to give meaning to their everyday lives. As illustrated in Table 9.1, each form of rationality corresponds to a specific mode of reasoning; addresses specific philosophical, ethical, or interpersonal questions; speaks to a unique dimension of the world of experience; and has distinct consequences for sociocultural reproduction.

Following Weber, Habermas conceptualizes instrumental rationality as a purposive and goal-oriented attitude underlying the pursuit of objective truth and technical, empirical knowledge. Instrumental rationality reflects the moment of reason captured by science as it serves to quantify, organize, and systematically control the objective or external world of physical objects. Moral-practical rationality is a form of reasoning that shapes our understanding of cultural norms and values, ethics and law, justice, and the exercise of authority—in short, the “rightness” and legitimacy of action. Tied to law,

490  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

it serves as a normative and moral guide within the social world of interpersonal rela- tions. Finally, aesthetic-expressive rationality informs our evaluations of taste and the sincerity or deceitfulness of managed self-presentations and expressions (Goffman 1959). It is oriented to the subjective or internal world of personal experience and artis- tic judgment (see Table 9.1).

While his analysis of rationality shares much with Weber’s moments of reason, Habermas nevertheless contends that Weber (as well as Marx, the earlier critical theorists, and Parsons, all of whose ideas he incorporates in some fashion) failed to recognize a vital dimension of human rationality, one that is embodied in intersubjective communication. To fill this gap, Habermas draws on the work of symbolic interactionists and phenome- nologists (most notably George Herbert Mead and Alfred Schutz) and linguistic philoso- phers to develop his notion of “communicative rationality” or “communicative action.” Habermas defines communicative action as the process in which individuals come to mutual understanding and consensus through open, noncoercive debate and discussion freed from the corrosive effects of money, power, and manipulation. Encompassing the other forms of rationality and addressing simultaneously the worlds of objective, social, and subjective experience, communicative action embodies a critical stance that allows for the negotiation of shared meanings, the coordination of action, and the socialization of individuals. In the process, communicative action—itself an outgrowth of the evolu- tionary rationalization of the lifeworld—reproduces the lifeworld by transmitting the cultural stock of knowledge, integrating individuals into the community, and securing the formation of personal and social identities. For Habermas, then, the rationality embedded within communicative action provides the foundation for renewing the social order according to the simultaneous demands for proof, justice, and authenticity.

Significantly, communicative rationality is achieved only when individuals are confident that the claims being made by others meet the criteria for proof specific to the other three worlds. For instance, while a person may convince us of the truth of her statements (objec- tive world), we may still doubt the sincerity of her intentions (subjective world) or the normative appropriateness, the “rightness,” of what she says (social world). Indeed, deter- mining whether someone is attempting to reach a shared understanding or trying to manip- ulate us is a crucial aspect of communication. Communicative action is the crucial means through which technical, moral, and aesthetic critiques can be advanced, providing in turn the basis for mutual agreement and a thriving democracy.

Rationality

Moment of Reason

Questions Addressed

World

Action

Instrumental Science Truth/Knowledge Objective Teleological

Moral-Practical Law Justice/Morality Social Normatively regulated

Aesthetic-Expressive Art Aesthetics/Sincerity Subjective Dramaturgical

Communicative Critical Mutual understanding Coordination of action

Socialization

Lifeworld Transmission of cultural knowledge

Social integration Formation of identity

Table 9.1 Summary of Habermas’s Theory of Action

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To shed light on how these forms of rationality and the worlds they connect to shape interaction, consider the following set of statements that could come up in a discussion. “Did you know that in America, women are paid less than men for performing the same work? I think America is a sexist country; otherwise we wouldn’t accept this. We must do something to change gender relations and stop the discriminatory treatment of women.” To these statements we would apply the various forms of rationality in order to determine whether or not an agreement can be reached on the issues at hand. The first statement primarily addresses the objective world of facts. Here we might seek relevant scientific statistics in order to be convinced of the truth of the claim. The second statement does not address the world of facts; rather, it speaks to the social world of normative expectations that regulate behavior and interpersonal relations in American society. This statement implies that the truth is not “right,” that in a society that promises equality for all, such treatment is not morally legitimate and “ought” not exist. In response, we would consider whether or not the person is entitled or justified to assert this claim, given our understand- ing of society’s normative code. The third statement is directed toward the subjective world and leads us to consider whether or not the speaker is being sincere or deceitful in making her claim. In determining if she really means what she says, we would gauge her self-presentation and management of expressions to assess whether ulterior motives might be at play. Communicative rationality is obtained when uncoerced, mutual agreement is reached in each “world” of interaction, and the truth, rightness, and sincerity of all claims are established.

Faith in Reason: The Public Sphere and “New” Social Movements

One of the more controversial elements of Habermas’s theory is his enduring faith in the power of reason and critical reflection to rescue humanity from systems of domination and oppression. His conviction not only places him at odds with the founders of critical theory, but also runs against the most basic claims of postmodern theorists. While postmodern theory (see Chapter 8) challenges the very existence of truth and contends that all knowl- edge is inherently relative, Habermas asserts that universal standards for establishing both facts and normative judgments not only are possible, but also mark the road toward advanc- ing individual freedom and creating a progressive society. In order to win the mantle of “truth,” universal standards must be born out of the democratic expression of communica- tive rationality. In modern society, communicative action that is directed toward broad social issues is most visible in the public sphere and in the protests mounted by new social movements.

Habermas (1962) argues that the world of public discussion and debate that first emerged within European bourgeois social circles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held great promise for the rise of democratic government. This world of public discussion and debate, or public sphere, is composed of an array of social spaces where, ideally, private individuals can publicly congregate and freely debate political, ethical, and social issues in a noncoercive and “undistorted” manner. The public sphere is not an institution, an organi- zation, or a system; rather, it is

a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affir- mative or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opin- ions. Like the lifeworld as a whole, so, too, the public sphere is reproduced through com- municative action. . . .

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The public sphere is differentiated into levels according to the density of communication, organizational complexity, and range—from the episodic publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through the occasional or “arranged” publics of particular presenta- tions and events, such as theater performances, rock concerts, party assemblies, or church congresses; up to the abstract public sphere of isolated readers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographic areas, or even around the globe, and brought together only through the mass media. (Habermas 1992/1996:360, 374)

If left free from distorting influences and guided by its own logic of communicative rationality, the public sphere makes possible the vigorous, compelling debate necessary for the unrestricted growth of democratic processes and the legitimation of the political system. In the public sphere, debate ideally is won on the merits of the best argument, and opinions are formed without consideration of the status or power of speakers or the intrusions of manipulation or coercion.

While Habermas’s notion of the public sphere has been roundly criticized for being overly idyllic (e.g., see Calhoun 1992; Kellner 2000; McCarthy 1978), he nevertheless maintains that the potential for creating a truly democratic society based on universal reason lies within this domain. He is, however, not entirely blind to his critics. He notes that the public sphere of open debate was deformed by the scale of its growth over the past century and by the rationalization of economic and political institutions whose technical require- ments and forms of rationality have seeped into the public sphere. With the extension of democratic rights, more citizens demanded inclusion in the public sphere, and the resulting “structural transformation” impeded its own rational development. “Social decisions were increasingly removed from the rational-critical discourse of citizens in the political public sphere and made the province of negotiation (rather than discourse proper) among bureau- crats, credentialed experts, and interest group elites” (Calhoun 1995:31). This is particularly evident in commercial mass media, whose dissemination of public news and information has been altered by “an influx of private interests that achieved privileged representation within it” (Habermas 1989:235; emphasis added). It is likewise evident in the manufactur- ing of “publicity” on the part of organized interest groups that manipulate the public sphere to carry out their “secret policies” (ibid.:236). The public sphere is now less a space for free debate than it is a market for the sale of prepackaged opinions.

Habermas’s argument reflects real concerns that we encounter every day. Think for a moment about the last time that you had a rigorous political or philosophical debate. This debate may have occurred within any number of arenas: your family; a friendship network; your school, workplace, or neighborhood; a community association devoted to sociopoliti- cal concerns or leisure activities; or perhaps the Internet. Yet, consider how much impact this debate may have had on the political processes that shape your social world. For many of us, such encounters happen infrequently, and when they do it is rarer that they have any- thing but a trivial impact on the political and economic life of our society. Habermas’s theory helps us understand why public debate seldom occurs and why it has little influence on the institutions that most dramatically affect our lives. He contends that the space for open, democratic, public discussion is limited to the extent that resources like money and power interfere in the process of opinion formation. Public debates have become all too infrequent because, in the face of political and economic processes that seem to be beyond our control, we recognize the limitations of their efficacy. Thus, we experience a type of communicative alienation within a public sphere that has become increasingly dominated by powerful and rationalized social forces (like political and economic interest groups) that are largely divorced from the influence of public deliberation. The result is that the public sphere idealized by Habermas has been deformed, making it all the more essential to recon- struct the vision of the emancipatory project that began with the Enlightenment.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  493

Nevertheless, Habermas refuses to give up on the promise of communicative rationality and its expression in the public sphere. He places his hopes for freedom and progress in “new” social movements whose efforts signal a resistance to the coloni- zation of the lifeworld and the deformation of the public sphere. New social movements are com- posed of an array of groups whose disparate aims are united by the “critique of growth.” They emerge from the margins of established economic and politi- cal structures to give voice to a “crisis consciousness” that calls attention to the social and envi- ronmental pathologies created in the wake of advanced industrial capitalism. Theirs are not the struggles of class-based labor movements seeking to effect a more egalitarian distribution of wealth or to secure more humane working conditions: the movements in which Marxist theorists placed their hopes and disap- pointments are no longer the vanguard for progressive change. It is not economic interests or issues concerning material reproduction that form the nucleus of their causes; rather, it is “qual- ity of life” issues that are embedded in the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. These con- cerns are expressed in the form of “green” groups fighting to stop the destruction of timberlands or reduce the reliance on polluting energy sources, antinuclear movements, squatters protesting the commercial buyout of affordable residential housing, efforts to end discrimination against homosexuals (such as recent efforts to legalize gay marriage), protests against the consolidation of the media, and demands for greater personal control over decisions regarding one’s health and life (such as efforts to legalize assisted suicide or the use of medical marijuana).

These movements are potentially effective avenues for invigorating the public sphere because they inject claims into the political process that are largely peripheral to the interests of bureaucratic political organizations and their leaders. New social movements and their counterinstitutional political tactics, like civil disobedience, are indicators that the emanci- patory project of the Enlightenment is still “unfinished.” By nurturing the mechanisms for communicative action, new social movements hold out the promise for democracy and social equality that can be fulfilled only through struggles to defend the lifeworld against the intrusion of money and power and the corrupting influences of instrumental rationality.

haBermaS’S theoretiCal orientation 

Like Bourdieu, Habermas draws from a diverse array of influences to create a system of thought that is broad, complex, and theoretically multidimensional. His work bears the imprint not only of classical sociological theorists (particularly Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Mead), but also of more contemporary thinkers in sociology, psychology, political science, phenomenology, and philosophy. The result of this synthesis is a theoretical system that blends individualist and col- lectivist levels of analysis, addresses concerns of individual agency and social structures, and explores issues of rational and nonrational dimensions of social life (see Figure 9.3).

Photo 9.3 Protesting for Civil Rights New social movements and the struggle over the “grammar of forms of life.”

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With regard to the issue of action, Habermas’s multidimensional approach is most appar- ent in his discussion of rationality (see Table 9.1). This model clearly reflects that action can be motivated by a number of factors. First, instrumental rationality refers to the means/ends calculations in which individuals seek to optimize the benefits that are likely to be reaped from pursuing a particular course of action. This entails a rational or technical approach to the social and physical world that asks how a given goal can be achieved most efficiently. Conversely, Habermas’s discussion of moral-practical rationality and aesthetic-expressive rationality speaks to nonrational motivating forces. A different set of motivating questions is raised to the extent that these forms of reasoning guide our actions. Instead of asking “how” or “if” a line of action can be profitably pursued, our behaviors are governed by normative considerations that lead us to ask why we should carry out a course of action. Our determinations of whether or not we ought to pursue a given line of conduct are grounded not in an evaluation of facts, but rather in normative prescriptions for behavior that are not subject to empirical proof. Such prescriptions are instead embedded in the traditions and customs of a given culture.

Habermas’s notion of communicative action is premised on the conviction that human emancipation is not possible as long as one form of reasoning dominates another. In an ideal, democratic society, both rational and nonrational forms of reasoning would motivate an individual’s actions. That is, in order to be truly progressive, our actions must satisfy technical requirements for efficiency as well as normative requirements for “rightness” and authenticity. Yet, modern societies have fallen short of the democratic ideal of mutual under- standing based on the full range of motivating forces. Individuals remain dominated by seemingly autonomous forces that have corrupted their capacity to reason.

Structural Functionalism � 3

Nonrational

Rational

Communicative action

Figure 9.3 Habermas’s Basic Concepts and Theoretical Orientation

CollectiveIndividual Public sphere

Instrumental rationality

Lifeworld

Aesthetic-expressive rationality

Moral-practical rationality

Colonization of the lifeworld

Steering mechanisms: Money/Power

System: State/Economy

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  495

In terms of the question of order (that is, “What accounts for the routines and patterns of behavior through which social life appears, and is experienced as, orderly and predict- able?”), Habermas again devises a multidimensional approach. While he holds on to the promise of a future society ordered on the basis of individually negotiated communication action, this condition, as well as all other forms of interaction, is dependent on the evolu- tionary stage of the relationship between the system and the lifeworld. Thus, Habermas contends that the distortion of consciousness—the unfreedom—that plagues modern individuals is a result of the steering media of economic and political systems colonizing the lifeworld and its framework of shared meanings and norms. Economic and political systems operate according to their own impersonal logic that confronts individuals as an abstract, amorphous force that largely defies their ability to control their own destinies. In short, modern society is ordered less by the ongoing negotiation of meanings through which the world is made and remade than by the imperatives of collectivist structures that shape the nature of social interaction. Indeed, it is this very condition that Habermas seeks to dismantle through his reviving of critical theory and reinvigorating of the public sphere.

It is important to note, however, that Habermas’s perspective by no means overlooks the individualist dimension. Incorporating both collectivist and individualist dimensions is an essential element in his theoretical system. His twin notions of system integration and social integration and his emphasis on the lifeworld are aimed precisely at understanding the (dis- torted) ways in which individuals construct their personal and collective identities, negotiate meanings, and, in the process, create and re-create the social order. The social order is pro- duced and reproduced as individuals coordinate their actions through processes of reaching understanding mediated within the lifeworld. In providing the symbolic resources for mak- ing sense of the world, the lifeworld establishes a horizon of possibilities that places “inter- nal limitations” on the reproduction of society. Such interpretive possibilities and limitations are formed within the minds of individuals and thus are not determined by the functional “needs” of the system. At the same time, however, actions are interconnected by system mechanisms that “are not intended by [individuals] and are usually not even perceived within the horizon of everyday practice” (ibid.).

Readings

In the selections that follow, you are presented with two key works from Jürgen Habermas. The first is an essay entitled “Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power,” in which Habermas outlines the key characteristics of the public sphere, its role in promoting discussion and debate, and the forces that impair its efficacy and corrupt the communicative processes ushering from the lifeworld. The second selection, “The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society,” finds Habermas extending these ideas, exploring the growing tensions that emerge between the system and the lifeworld, and the colonization of the latter by delinguistified steering media rooted in the system. Together, these selec- tions offer a set of ideas that examine the obstacles that jeopardize the realiza- tion of the emancipatory project embraced by Enlightenment thinkers, and a vision of hope for democracy in contemporary societies.

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Introduction to “Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power”

In the essay “Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power,” Habermas inves- tigates the connections between the public sphere, the formation of public opinion, and the effectiveness of democratic politics. The public sphere serves as a “sounding board” or “warning system” that alerts the political system to pressing social problems. It is not an organization or institution, but rather a “social space” or “network” that is created and repro- duced through communicative action. These spaces can take the form of “episodic” publics found, for instance, in cafés and on the street; “occasional” publics that meet for specific events, such as church group meetings, annual conventions, or political protests and rallies; or “abstract” publics consisting of isolated individuals who are “brought together” through their shared consumption of mass media.

As a space for opinion formation, the public sphere is not itself invested with political power, yet within its borders actors engage in a struggle over the ability to shape public opinion in order to catapult an issue into official, institutionalized political bodies. For pub- lic opinion to be transformed into effective political power it must first pass “through the filters of institutionalized procedures of democratic opinion- and will-formation and [enter] through parliamentary debates into legitimate lawmaking” (Habermas 1992/1996:371). These procedures are, in effect, “rules of a shared practice of communication” that deter- mine the “quality” or “success” of public opinion. They require that consensus on an issue “develops only as a result of more or less exhaustive controversy in which proposals, infor- mation, and reasons can be more or less rationally dealt with” (ibid.:362; emphasis in original). As a result, not all opinions are equally qualified to convince the public of their relevance. The public sphere is thus a crucial space for fostering democracy, since its egali- tarian public alone possesses the final authority to certify the salience and comprehensibility of publicly voiced opinions.

However, the democratic potential inherent in the public sphere is subject to distortion from at least two sources. First, money and organizational power are capable of manipulat- ing the process of public opinion formation so long as their use remains hidden from public view. Once the general public becomes aware of a previously undeclared infusion of money and power, public opinions developed and made visible by such resources lose their credi- bility. Certainly, the public uproar sparked by news stories detailing the illicit actions of interest groups and lobbyists and the behind-the-scene efforts of corporations and govern- ment officials attempting to shape public opinion reminds us that “public opinion can be manipulated, but neither publicly bought nor publicly blackmailed” (ibid.: 364).

A second threat to the democratically formed public sphere stems from journalism and the mass media. In a mass media–dominated public sphere such as our own, journalists and media executives act as gatekeepers for the flow of information. Through their decisions about what is newsworthy, they determine the topics and the viewpoints that are dissemi- nated to the mass audience. As a result, they have become increasingly powerful in the world of public opinion formation. Moreover, as the mass media become increasingly com- plex and expensive, avenues of communication become more centralized and consolidated within a few media conglomerates. Groups that are peripheral to the organized political system or that do not possess significant resources have become less able to influence media programming. As Habermas notes, this problem is compounded for those groups whose messages “do not fall inside the ‘balanced,’ that is, the centrist and rather narrowly defined, spectrum of ‘established opinions’ dominating the programs of the electronic media” (ibid.:377). In addition, the profit-driven market strategies that steer media programming lead to an oversimplification or watering down of information—infotainment—that “works

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to depoliticize public communication” (ibid.). Yet, Habermas claims that despite the public sphere’s apparent undermining, as soon as a “crisis consciousness” develops within the public sphere, the balance of power shifts as actors press for solutions to relevant social problems.

The crucial question now is whether or not a crisis consciousness is capable of develop- ing in light of recent political and legal events that have amplified the dangers posed by these two threats, further eroding what remains of the public sphere and our democracy. Perhaps most significant in this regard are the Federal Communications Commission’s December 2007 decision that overturned a thirty-year restriction preventing media corpora- tions from owing both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in one city, and the Supreme Court’s January 2010 ruling that struck down certain limits on corporate spending in political elections as violations of corporations’ First Amendment right to free speech. With the Court’s new ruling, corporations now have the right as “individuals” to advocate directly for or against specific candidates through the unrestricted purchasing of advertising time and space. Such decisions suggest that the distortion of the democratic potential inherent in the public sphere is being championed by our own “democratic” gov- ernment through its expansion of the role that corporate money and power can play in shap- ing the “will of the people.”

“Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power” (1996)

Jürgen Habermas

I have described the political public sphere as a sounding board for problems that must be pro- cessed by the political system because they can- not be solved elsewhere. To this extent, the pub- lic sphere is a warning system with sensors that, though unspecialized, are sensitive throughout society. From the perspective of democratic the- ory, the public sphere must, in addition, amplify the pressure of problems, that is not only detect and identify problems but also convincingly and influentially thematize them, furnish them with possible solutions, and dramatize them in such a way that they are taken up and dealt with by parliamentary complexes. Besides the “signal” function, there must be an effective problemati- zation. The capacity of the public sphere to solve problems on its own is limited. But this capacity must be utilized to oversee the further treatment of problems that takes place inside the political system. . . .

The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, actor, association, or col- lectivity, but it eludes the conventional socio- logical concepts of “social order.” The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organization. It is not even a framework of norms with differentiated compe- tences and roles, membership regulations, and so on. Just as little does it represent a system; although it permits one to draw international boundaries, outwardly it is characterized by open, permeable, and shifting horizons. The pub- lic sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically

SOURCE: “Civil Society, Public Opinion, and Communicative Power” from Between Facts and Norms: Con- tributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jürgen Harbermas, translated by William Rehg. Copyright © 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Reprinted with permission of The MIT Press.

498  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

specified public opinions. Like the lifeworld as a whole, so, too, the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action, for which mas- tery of a natural language suffices; it is tailored to the general comprehensibility of everyday communicative practice. We have become acquainted with the “lifeworld” as a reservoir for simple interactions; specialized systems of action and knowledge that are differentiated within the lifeworld remain tied to these interactions. These systems fall into one of two categories. Systems like religion, education, and the family become associated with general reproductive functions of the lifeworld (that is, with cultural reproduction, social integration, or socialization). Systems like science, morality, and art take up different valid- ity aspects of everyday communicative action (truth, rightness, or veracity). The public sphere, however, is specialized in neither of these two ways; to the extent that it extends to politically relevant questions, it leaves their specialized treatment to the political system. Rather, the public sphere distinguishes itself through a com- munication structure that is related to a third feature of communicative action: it refers neither to the functions nor to the contents of everyday communication but to the social space generated in communicative action.

Unlike success-oriented actors who mutually observe each other as one observes something in the objective world, persons acting communica- tively encounter each other in a situation they at the same time constitute with their cooperatively negotiated interpretations. The intersubjectively shared space of a speech situation is disclosed when the participants enter into interpersonal rela- tionships by taking positions on mutual speech- act offers and assuming illocutionary obligations. Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person atti- tude, reciprocally attributing communicative free- dom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public space. This space stands open, in principle, for potential dialogue partners who are present as bystanders or could come on the scene and join those present. That is, special measures would be required to prevent a third party from entering such a linguistically consti- tuted space. Founded in communicative action, this spatial structure of simple and episodic encounters can be expanded and rendered more

permanent in an abstract form for a larger public of present persons. For the public infrastructure of such assemblies, performances, presentations, and so on, architectural metaphors of structured spaces recommend themselves: we speak of forums, stages, arenas, and the like. These public spheres still cling to the concrete locales where an audience is physically gathered. The more they detach themselves from the public’s physi- cal presence and extend to the virtual presence of scattered readers, listeners, or viewers linked by public media, the clearer becomes the abstrac- tion that enters when the spatial structure of simple interactions is expanded into a public sphere.

When generalized in this way, communica- tion structures contract to informational content and points of view that are uncoupled from the thick context of simple interactions, from spe- cific persons, and from practical obligations. At the same time, context generalization, inclusion, and growing anonymity demand a higher degree of explication that must dispense with technical vocabularies and special codes. Whereas the orientation to laypersons implies a certain loss in differentiation, uncoupling communicated opin- ions from concrete practical obligations tends to have an intellectualizing effect. Processes of opinion-formation, especially when they have to do with political questions, certainly cannot be separated from the transformation of the partici- pants’ preferences and attitudes, but they can be separated from putting these dispositions into action. To this extent, the communication struc- tures of the public sphere relieve the public of the burden of decision making; the postponed deci- sions are reserved for the institutionalized politi- cal process. In the public sphere, utterances are sorted according to issue and contribution, whereas the contributions are weighted by the affirmative versus negative responses they receive. Information and arguments are thus worked into focused opinions. What makes such “bundled” opinions into public opinion is both the controversial way it comes about and the amount of approval that “carries” it. Public opin- ion is not representative in the statistical sense. It is not an aggregate of individually gathered, privately expressed opinions held by isolated persons. Hence it must not be confused with survey results. Political opinion polls provide a

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  499

certain reflection of “public opinion” only if they have been preceded by a focused public debate and a corresponding opinion-formation in a mobilized public sphere.

The diffusion of information and points of view via effective broadcasting media is not the only thing that matters in public processes of communication, nor is it the most important. True, only the broad circulation of comprehen- sible, attention-grabbing messages arouses a suf- ficiently inclusive participation. But the rules of a shared practice of communication are of greater significance for structuring public opin- ion. Agreement on issues and contributions develops only as the result of more or less exhaustive controversy in which proposals, information, and reasons can be more or less rationally dealt with. In general terms, the dis- cursive level of opinion-formation and the “qual- ity” of the outcome vary with this “more or less” in the “rational” processing of “exhaustive” proposals, information, and reasons. Thus the success of public communication is not intrinsi- cally measured by the requirement of inclusion either but by the formal criteria governing how a qualified public opinion comes about. The struc- tures of a power-ridden, oppressed public sphere exclude fruitful and clarifying discussions. The “quality” of public opinion, insofar as it is mea- sured by the procedural properties of its process of generation, is an empirical variable. From a normative perspective, this provides a basis for measuring the legitimacy of the influence that public opinion has on the political system. Of course, actual influence coincides with legiti- mate influence just as little as the belief in legiti- macy coincides with legitimacy. But conceiving things this way at least opens a perspective from which the relation between actual influence and the procedurally grounded quality of public opinion can be empirically investigated.

Parsons introduced “influence” as a symboli- cally generalized form of communication that facilitates interactions in virtue of conviction or persuasion. For example, persons or institutions can enjoy a reputation that allows their utter- ances to have an influence on others’ beliefs without having to demonstrate authority or to give explanations in the situation. “Influence” feeds on the resource of mutual understanding, but it is based on advancing trust in beliefs that

are not currently tested. In this sense, public opinion represents political potentials that can be used for influencing the voting behavior of citizens or the will-formation in parliamentary bodies, administrative agencies, and courts. Nat- urally, political influence supported by public opinion is converted into political power—into a potential for rendering binding decisions—only when it affects the beliefs and decisions of authorized members of the political system and determines the behavior of voters, legislators, officials, and so forth. Just like social power, political influence based on public opinion can be transformed into political power only through institutionalized procedures.

Influence develops in the public sphere and becomes the object of struggle there. This strug- gle involves not only the political influence that has already been acquired (such as that enjoyed by experienced political leaders and officehold- ers, established parties, and well-known groups like Greenpeace and Amnesty International). The reputation of groups of persons and experts who have acquired their influence in special pub- lic spheres also comes into play (for example, the authority of religious leaders, the public visibil- ity of literary figures and artists, the reputation of scientists, and the popularity of sports figures and movie stars). For as soon as the public space has expanded beyond the context of simple interac- tions, a differentiation sets in among organizers, speakers, and hearers; arenas and galleries; stage and viewing space. The actors’ roles that increas- ingly professionalize and multiply with organiza- tional complexity and range of media are, of course, furnished with unequal opportunities for exerting influence. But the political influence that the actors gain through public communication must ultimately rest on the resonance and indeed the approval of a lay public whose composition is egalitarian. The public of citizens must be con- vinced by comprehensible and broadly interesting contributions to issues it finds relevant. The pub- lic audience possesses final authority, because it is constitutive for the internal structure and reproduction of the public sphere, the only place where actors can appear. There can be no public sphere without a public.

To be sure, we must distinguish the actors who, so to speak, emerge from the public and take part in the reproduction of the public sphere

500  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

itself from actors who occupy an already consti- tuted public domain in order to use it. This is true, for example, of the large and well- organized interest groups that are anchored in various social subsystems and affect the political system through the public sphere. They cannot make any manifest use in the public sphere of the sanc- tions and rewards they rely on in bargaining or in nonpublic attempts at pressure. They can capital- ize on their social power and convert it into political power only insofar as they can advertise their interests in a language that can mobilize convincing reasons and shared value orienta- tions—as, for example, when parties to wage negotiations inform the public about demands, strategies, or outcomes. The contributions of interest groups are, in any case, vulnerable to a kind of criticism to which contributions from other sources are not exposed. Public opinions that can acquire visibility only because of an undeclared infusion of money or organizational power lose their credibility as soon as these sources of social power are made public. Public opinion can be manipulated but neither publicly bought nor publicly blackmailed. This is due to the fact that a public sphere cannot be “manufac- tured” as one pleases. Before it can be captured by actors with strategic intent, the public sphere together with its public must have developed as a structure that stands on its own and reproduces itself out of itself. This lawlike regularity govern- ing the formation of a public sphere remains latent in the constituted public sphere—and takes effect again only in moments when the public sphere is mobilized.

The political public sphere can fulfill its func- tion of perceiving and thematizing encompassing social problems only insofar as it develops out of the communication taking place among those who are potentially affected. It is carried by a public recruited from the entire citizenry. But in the diverse voices of this public, one hears the echo of private experiences that are caused throughout society by the externalities (and inter- nal disturbances) of various functional systems— and even by the very state apparatus on whose regulatory activities the complex and poorly coordinated sub-systems depend. Systemic defi- ciencies are experienced in the context of indi- vidual life histories; such burdens accumulate in the lifeworld. The latter has the appropriate

antennae, for in its horizon are intermeshed the private life histories of the “clients” of functional systems that might be failing in their delivery of services. It is only for those who are immediately affected that such services are paid in the cur- rency of “use values.” Besides religion, art, and literature, only the spheres of “private” life have an existential language at their disposal, in which such socially generated problems can be assessed in terms of one’s own life history. Problems voiced in the public sphere first become visible when they are mirrored in personal life experi- ences. To the extent that these experiences find their concise expression in the languages of reli- gion, art, and literature, the “literary” public sphere in the broader sense, which is specialized for the articulation of values and world disclo- sure, is intertwined with the political public sphere.

As both bearers of the political public sphere and as members of society, citizens occupy two positions at once. As members of society, they occupy the roles of employees and consumers, insured persons and patients, taxpayers and cli- ents of bureaucracies, as well as the roles of students, tourists, commuters, and the like; in such complementary roles, they are especially exposed to the specific requirements and failures of the corresponding service systems. Such experiences are first assimilated “privately,” that is are interpreted within the horizon of a life his- tory intermeshed with other life histories in the contexts of shared lifeworlds. The communica- tion channels of the public sphere are linked to private spheres—to the thick networks of inter- action found in families and circles of friends as well as to the looser contacts with neighbors, work colleagues, acquaintances, and so on—and indeed they are linked in such a way that the spatial structures of simple interactions are expanded and abstracted but not destroyed. Thus the orientation to reaching understanding that is predominant in everyday practice is also pre- served for a communication among strangers that is conducted over great distances in public spheres whose branches are quite complex. The threshold separating the private sphere from the public is not marked by a fixed set of issues or relationships but by different conditions of com- munication. Certainly these conditions lead to differences in the accessibility of the two spheres,

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  501

safeguarding the intimacy of the one sphere and publicity of the other. However, they do not seal off the private from the public but only channel the flow of topics from the one sphere into the other. For the public sphere draws its impulses from the private handling of social problems that resonate in life histories. It is symptomatic of this close connection, incidentally, that a modern bourgeois public sphere developed in the Euro- pean societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the “sphere of private persons come together as a public.” Viewed historically, the connection between the public and the private spheres is manifested in the clubs and organiza- tional forms of a reading public composed of bourgeois private persons and crystallizing around newspapers and journals.

This sphere of civil society has been rediscov- ered today in wholly new historical constella- tions. The expression “civil society” has in the meantime taken on a meaning different from that of the “bourgeois society” of the liberal tradition, which Hegel conceptualized as a “system of needs,” that is, as a market system involving social labor and commodity exchange. What is meant by “civil society” today, in contrast to its usage in the Marxist tradition, no longer includes the economy as constituted by private law and steered through markets in labor, capital, and commodities. Rather, its institutional core com- prises those nongovernmental and non-economic connections and voluntary associations that anchor the communication structures of the public sphere in the society component of the lifeworld. Civil society is composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organiza- tions, and movements that, attuned to how soci- etal problems resonate in the private life spheres, distill and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere. The core of civil society comprises a network of associations that institu- tionalizes problem-solving discourses on ques- tions of general interest inside the framework of

organized public spheres. These “discursive designs” have an egalitarian, open form of orga- nization that mirrors essential features of the kind of communication around which they crys- tallize and to which they lend continuity and permanence.

Such associations certainly do not represent the most conspicuous element of a public sphere dominated by mass media and large agencies, observed by market and opinion research, and inundated by the public relations work, propa- ganda, and advertising of political parties and groups. All the same, they do form the organiza- tional substratum of the general public of citi- zens. More or less emerging from the private sphere, this public is made of citizens who seek acceptable interpretations for their social inter- ests and experiences and who want to have an influence on institutionalized opinion- and will-formation.

One searches the literature in vain for clear definitions of civil society that would go beyond such descriptive characterizations. . . . Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, who have presented the most comprehensive study on this topic, pro- vide a catalog of features characterizing the civil society that is demarcated from the state, the economy, and other functional systems but cou- pled with the core private spheres of the life- world:

(1) Plurality: families, informal groups, and voluntary associations whose plurality and autonomy allow for a variety of forms of life; (2) Publicity: institutions of culture and communication; (3) Privacy: a domain of individual self-development and moral choice; (4) Legality: structures of publicity from at least the state and, tendentially, the economy. Together, these structures secure the institutional existence of a modern dif- ferentiated civil society.i . . .

The constitution of this sphere through basic rights provides some indicators for its social structure. Freedom of assembly and freedom of association, when linked with freedom of speech,

iJ. L. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 346.

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define the scope for various types of associations and societies: for voluntary associations that intervene in the formation of public opinion, push topics of general interest, and act as advo- cates for neglected issues and underrepresented groups; for groups that are difficult to organize or that pursue cultural, religious, or humanitarian aims; and for ethnical communities, religious denominations, and so on. Freedom of the press, radio, and television, as well as the right to engage in these areas, safeguards the media infrastructure of public communication; such liberties are thereby supposed to preserve an openness for competing opinions and a represen- tative diversity of voices. The political system, which must remain sensitive to the influence of public opinion, is intertwined with the public sphere and civil society through the activity of political parties and general elections. This inter- meshing is guaranteed by the right of parties to “collaborate” in the political will-formation of the people, as well as by the citizens’ and passive voting rights and other participatory rights. Finally, the network of associations can assert its autonomy and preserve its spontaneity only inso- far as it can draw support from a mature plural- ism of forms of life, subcultures, and world- views. The constitutional protection of “privacy” promotes the integrity of private life spheres: rights of personality, freedom of belief and of conscience, freedom of movement, the pri- vacy of letters, mail, and telecommunications, the inviolability of one’s residence, and the protection of families circumscribe an untouch- able zone of personal integrity and independent judgment.

The tight connection between an autonomous civil society and an integral private sphere stands out even more clearly when contrasted with totalitarian societies of bureaucratic socialism. Here a panoptic state not only directly controls the bureaucratically desiccated public sphere, it also undermines the private basis of this public sphere. Administrative intrusions and constant supervision corrode the communicative structure of everyday contacts in families and schools, neighborhoods and local municipalities. The destruction of solidary living conditions and the paralysis of initiative and independent engage- ment in overregulated yet legally uncertain

sectors go hand in hand with the crushing of social groups, associations, and networks: with indoctrination and the dissolution of cultural identities; with the suffocation of spontaneous public communication. Communicative rational- ity is thus destroyed simultaneously in both pub- lic and private contexts of communication. The more the bonding force of communicative action wanes in private life spheres and the embers of communicative freedom die out, the easier it is for someone who monopolizes the public sphere to align the mutually estranged and isolated actors into a mass that can be directed and mobi- lized in a plebiscitarian manner.

Basic constitutional guarantees alone, of course, cannot preserve the public sphere and civil society from deformations. The communi- cation structures of the public sphere must rather be kept intact by an energetic civil society. That the political public sphere must in a certain sense reproduce and stabilize itself from its own resources is shown by the odd self-referential character of the practice of communication in civil society. Those actors who are the carriers of the public sphere put forward “texts” that always reveal the same subtext, which refers to the criti- cal function of the public sphere in general. Whatever the manifest content of their public utterances, the performative meaning of such public discourse at the same time actualizes the function of an undistorted political public sphere as such. Thus, the institutions and legal guaran- tees of free and open opinion-formation rest on the unsteady ground of the political communica- tion of actors who, in making use of them, at the same time interpret, defend, and radicalize their normative content. Actors who know they are involved in the common enterprise of reconstitut- ing and maintaining structures of the public sphere as they contest opinions and strive for influence differ from actors who merely use forums that already exist. More specifically, actors who support the public sphere are distin- guished by the dual orientation of their political engagement: with their programs, they directly influence the political system, but at the same time they are also reflexively concerned with revitalizing and enlarging civil society and the public sphere as well as with confirming their own identities and capacities to act.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  503

Cohen and Arato see this kind of “dual poli- tics” especially in the “new” social movements that simultaneously pursue offensive and defen- sive goals. “Offensively,” these movements attempt to bring up issues relevant to the entire society, to define ways of approaching problems, to propose possible solutions, to supply new information, to interpret values differently, to mobilize good reasons and criticize bad ones. Such initiatives are intended to produce a broad shift in public opinion, to alter the parameters of organized political will-formation, and to exert pressure on parliaments, courts, and administra- tions in favor of specific policies. “Defensively,” they attempt to maintain existing structures of association and public influence, to generate subcultural counterpublics and counterinstitu- tions, to consolidate new collective identities, and to win new terrain in the form of expanded rights and reformed institutions:

On this account, the “defensive” aspect of the movements involves preserving and developing the communicative infrastructure of the life- world. . . . This is the sine qua non for success- ful efforts to redefine identities, to reinterpret norms, and to develop egalitarian, democratic associational forms. The expressive, normative and communicative modes of collective action . . . [also involve] efforts to secure insti- tutional changes within civil society that cor- respond to the new meanings, identities, and norms that are created.ii

In the self-referential mode of reproducing the public sphere, as well as in the Janus-faced politics aimed at the political system and the self-stabilization of public sphere and civil soci- ety, the space is provided for the extension and radicalization of existing rights: “The combina- tion of associations, publics, and rights, when supported by a political culture in which inde- pendent initiatives and movements represent an ever-renewable, legitimate, political option, rep- resents, in our opinion, an effective set of bul- warks around civil society within whose limits much of the program of radical democracy can be reformulated.iii

In fact, the interplay of a public sphere based in civil society with the opinion- and will-formation institutionalized in parliamentary bodies and courts offers a good starting point for translating the con- cept of deliberative politics into sociological terms. However, we must not look on civil society as a focal point where the lines of societal self-organiza- tion as a whole would converge. Cohen and Arato rightly emphasize the limited scope for action that civil society and the public sphere afford to nonin- stitutionalized political movements and forms of political expression. They speak of a structurally necessary “self-limitation” of radical-democratic practice:

First, a robust civil society can develop only in the context of a liberal political culture and the corresponding patterns of socialization, and on the basis of an integral private sphere; it can blos- som only in an already rationalized lifeworld. Otherwise, populist movements arise that blindly defend the frozen traditions of a lifeworld endan- gered by capitalist modernization. In their forms of mobilization, these fundamentalist movements are as modern as they are antidemocratic.

Second, within the boundaries of the public sphere, or at least of a liberal public sphere, actors can acquire only influence, not political power. The influence of a public opinion gener- ated more or less discursively in open controver- sies is certainly an empirical variable that can make a difference. But public influence is trans- formed into communicative power only after it passes through the filters of the institutionalized procedures of democratic opinion- and will-for- mation and enters through parliamentary debates into legitimate lawmaking. The informal flow of public opinion issues in beliefs that have been tested from the standpoint of the generalizability of interests. Not influence per se, but influence transformed into communicative power legiti- mates political decisions. The popular sover- eignty set communicatively aflow cannot make itself felt solely in the influence of informal public discourses—not even when these dis- courses arise from autonomous public spheres. To generate political power, their influence must have an effect on the democratically regulated

iiCohen and Arato, Civil Society, p. 531. iiiCohen and Arato, Civil Society, p. 474.

504  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

deliberations of democratically elected assem- blies and assume an authorized form in formal decisions. This also holds, mutatis mutandis, for courts that decide politically relevant cases.

Third, and finally, the instruments that poli- tics have available in law and administrative power have limited effectiveness in functionally differentiated societies. Politics indeed continues to be the addressee for all unmanaged integration problems. But political steering can often take only an indirect approach and must, as we have seen, leave intact the modes of operation internal to functional systems and other highly organized spheres of action. As a result, democratic move- ments emerging from civil society must give up holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society, aspirations that also undergirded Marxist ideas of social revolution. Civil society can directly transform only itself, and it can have at most an indirect effect on the self-transformation of the political system; generally, it has an influence only on the personnel and programming of this system. But in no way does it occupy the posi- tion of a macrosubject supposed to bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it. Besides these limitations, one must bear in mind that the administrative power deployed for purposes of social planning and supervision is not a suitable medium for fostering emancipated forms of life. These can develop in the wake of democratization processes but they cannot be brought about through intervention. . . .

iii

. . . In complex societies, the public sphere con- sists of an intermediary structure between the political system, on the one hand, and the private sectors of the lifeworld and functional systems, on the other. It represents a highly complex net- work that branches out into a multitude of over- lapping international, national, regional, local, and subcultural arenas. Functional specifica- tions, thematic foci, policy fields, and so forth, provide the points of reference for a substantive differentiation of public spheres that are, how- ever, still accessible to laypersons (for example, popular science and literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist and “alternative” publics, publics concerned with health-care

issues, social welfare, or environmental policy). Moreover, the public sphere is differentiated into levels according to the density of communica- tion, organizational complexity, and range—from the episodic publics found in taverns, coffee houses, or on the streets; through the occasional or “arranged” publics of particular presentations and events, such as theater performances, rock concerts, party assemblies, or church congresses; up to the abstract public sphere of isolated read- ers, listeners, and viewers scattered across large geographic areas, or even around the globe, and brought together only through the mass media. Despite these manifold differentiations, how- ever, all the partial publics constituted by ordi- nary language remain porous to one another. The one text of “the” public sphere, a text continually extrapolated and extending radially in all direc- tions, is divided by internal boundaries into arbi- trarily small texts for which everything else is context; yet one can always build hermeneutical bridges from one text to the next. Segmented public spheres are constituted with the help of exclusion mechanisms; however, because pub- lics cannot harden into organizations or systems, there is no exclusion rule without a proviso for its abolishment. . . .

The more the audience is widened through mass communications, the more inclusive and the more abstract in form it becomes. Correspond- ingly, the roles of the actors appearing in the arenas are, to an increasing degree, sharply sepa- rated from the roles of the spectators in the galler- ies. Although the “success of the actors in the arena is ultimately decided in the galleries, the question arises of how autonomous the public is when it takes a position on an issue, whether its affirmative or negative stand reflects a process of becoming informed or in fact only a more or less concealed game of power. Despite the wealth of empirical investigations, we still do not have a well-established answer to this cardinal question. But one can at least pose the question more pre- cisely by assuming that public processes of com- munication can take place with less distortion the more they are left to the internal dynamic of a civil society that emerges from the lifeworld.

One can distinguish, at least tentatively, the more loosely organized actors who “emerge from” the public, as it were, from other actors merely “appearing before” the public. The latter

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  505

have organizational power, resources, and sanc- tions available from the start. Naturally, the actors who are more firmly anchored in civil society and participate in the reproduction of the public sphere also depend on the support of “sponsors” who supply the necessary resources of money, organization, knowledge, and social capital. But patrons or “like-minded” sponsors do not necessarily reduce the authenticity of the public actors they support. By contrast, the col- lective actors who merely enter the public sphere from, and utilize it for, a specific organization or functional system have their own basis of sup- port. Among these political and social actors who do not have to obtain their resources from other spheres, I primarily include the large inter- est groups that enjoy social power, as well as the established parties that have largely become arms of the political system. They draw on mar- ket studies and opinion surveys and conduct their own professional public-relations campaigns.

In and of themselves, organizational complex- ity, resources, professionalization, and so on, are admittedly insufficient indicators for the differ- ence between “indigenous” actors and mere users. Nor can an actor’s pedigree be read directly from the interests actually represented. Other indicators are more reliable. Thus actors differ in how they can be identified. Some actors one can easily identify from their functional background; that is, they represent political parties or pressure groups; unions or professional associations; consumer- protection groups or rent-control organizations, and so on. Other actors, by contrast, must first produce identifying features. This is especially evident with social movements that initially go through a phase of self-identification and self- legitimation; even after that, they still pursue a self-referential “identity politics” parallel to their goal-directed politics—they must continually reassure themselves of their identity. Whether actors merely use an already constituted public sphere or whether they are involved in reproduc- ing its structures is, moreover, evident in the above-mentioned sensitivity to threats to commu- nication rights. It is also shown in the actors’ willingness to go beyond an interest in self- defense and take a universalist stand against the open or concealed exclusion of minorities or marginal groups. The very existence of social movements, one might add, depends on whether

they find organizational forms that produce soli- darities and publics, forms that allow them to fully utilize and radicalize existing communica- tion rights and structures as they pursue special goals.

A third group of actors are the journalists, publicity agents, and members of the press (i.e., in the broad sense of Publizisten) who collect information, make decisions about the selection and presentation of “programs,” and to a certain extent control the entry of topics, contributions, and authors into the mass-media-dominated pub- lic sphere. As the mass media become more complex and more expensive, the effective chan- nels of communication become more central- ized. To the degree this occurs, the mass media face an increasing pressure of selection, on both the supply side and the demand side. These selection processes become the source of a new sort of power. This power of the media is not suf- ficiently reined in by professional standards, but today, by fits and starts, the “fourth branch of government” is being subjected to constitutional regulation. In the Federal Republic, for example, it is both the legal form and the institutional structure of television networks that determine whether they depend more on the influence of political parties and public interest groups or more on private firms with large advertising out- lays. In general, one can say that the image of politics presented on television is predominantly made up of issues and contributions that are pro- fessionally produced as media input and then fed in via press conferences, news agencies, public- relations campaigns, and the like. These official producers of information are all the more suc- cessful the more they can rely on trained person- nel, on financial and technical resources, and in general on a professional infrastructure. Collec- tive actors operating outside the political system or outside large organizations normally have fewer opportunities to influence the content and views presented by the media. This is especially true for messages that do not fall inside the “bal- anced,” that is, the centrist and rather narrowly defined, spectrum of “established options” dom- inating the programs of the electronic media.

Moreover, before messages selected in this way are broadcast, they are subject to informa- tion-processing strategies within the media. These are oriented by reception conditions as

506  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

perceived by media experts, program directors, and the press. Because the public’s receptive- ness, cognitive capacity, and attention represent unusually scarce resources for which the pro- grams of numerous “stations” compete, the pre- sentation of news and commentaries for the most part follows market strategies. Reporting facts as human-interest stores, mixing information with entertainment, arranging material episodically, and breaking down complex relationships into smaller fragments—all of this comes together to form a syndrome that works to depoliticize pub- lic communication. This is the kernel of truth in the theory of the culture industry. The research literature provides fairly reliable information on the institutional framework and structure of the media, as well as on the way they work, organize programs, and are utilized. But, even a genera- tion after Paul Lazarsfeld, propositions concern- ing the effects of the media remain controversial. The research on effect and reception has at least done away with the image of passive consumers as “cultural dopes” who are manipulated by the programs offered to them. It directs our attention to the strategies of interpretation employed by viewers, who communicate with one another, and who in fact can be provoked to criticize or reject what programs offer or to synthesize it with judgments of their own.

Even if we know something about the internal operation and impact of the mass media, as well as about the distribution of roles among the pub- lic and various actors, and even if we can make some reasonable conjectures about who has privileged access to the media and who has a share in media power, it is by no means clear how the mass media intervene in the diffuse cir- cuits of communication in the political public sphere. The normative reactions to the relatively new phenomenon of the mass media’s powerful position in the competition for public influence are clearer. Michael Gurevitch and Jay G. Blum- ler have summarized the tasks that the media ought to fulfill in democratic political systems:

1. surveillance of the sociopolitical environ- ment, reporting developments likely to

impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of citizens;

2. meaningful agenda-setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the forces that have formed and may resolve them;

3. platforms for an intelligible and illuminat- ing advocacy by politicians and spokesper- sons of other causes and interest groups;

4. dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power-holders (actual and prospective) and mass publics;

5. mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised power;

6. incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved, rather than merely to fol- low and kibitz over the political process;

7. a principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert their independence, integrity and ability to serve the audience;

8. a sense of respect for the audience mem- ber, as potentially concerned and able to make sense of his or her political envi- ronment.iv

Such principles orient the professional code of journalism and the profession’s ethical self- understanding, on the one hand, and the formal organization of a free press by laws governing mass communication, on the other. In agreement with the concept of deliberative politics, these principles express a simple idea: the mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatary of an enlightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they at once pre- suppose, demand, and reinforce; like the judi- ciary, they ought to preserve their independence from political and social pressure; they ought to be receptive to the public’s concerns and propos- als, take up these issues and contributions impar- tially, augment criticisms, and confront the polit- ical process with articulate demands for legiti- mation. The power of the media should thus be neutralized and the tacit conversion of

ivM. Gurevitch and J. G. Blumler, “Political Communication Systems and Democratic Values,” in J. Lichtenberg, ed., Democracy and the Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), p. 270.

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  507

administrative or social power into political influence blocked. According to this idea, politi- cal and social actors would be allowed to “use” the public sphere only insofar as they make con- vincing contributions to the solution of problems that have been perceived by the public or have been put on the public agenda with the public’s consent. In a similar vein, political parties would have to participate in the opinion- and will-for- mation from the public’s own perspective, rather than patronizing the public and extracting mass loyalty from the public sphere for the purposes of maintaining their own power.

With this I return to the central question of who can place issues on the agenda and determine what direction the lines of communication take. Roger Cobb, Jennie-Keith Ross, and Marc How- ard Ross have constructed models that depict how new and compelling issues develop, from the first initiative up to formal proceedings in bodies that have the power to decide.v If one suit- ably modifies the proposed models—inside access model, mobilization model, outside initia- tive model—from the viewpoint of democratic theory, they present basic alternatives in how the public sphere and the political system influence each other. In the first case, the initiative comes from office holders or political leaders, and the issue continues to circulate inside the political system all the way to its formal treatment, while the broader public is either excluded from the process or does not have any influence on it. In the second case, the initiative again starts inside the political system, but the proponents of the issue must mobilize the public sphere, because they need the support of certain groups, either to obtain formal consideration or to implement an adopted program successfully. Only in the third case does the initiative lie with forces at the periphery, outside the purview of the political system. With the help of the mobilized public sphere, that is, the pressure of public opinion,

such forces compel formal consideration of the issue:

The outside initiative model applies to the situ- ation in which a group outside the government structure 1) articulates a grievance, 2) tries to expand interest in the issue enough to other groups in the population to gain a place on the public agenda, in order to 3) create sufficient pressure on decision makers to force the issue onto the formal agenda for their serious consid- eration. This model of agenda building is likely to predominate in more egalitarian societies. Formal agenda status, . . . however, does not necessarily mean that the final decisions of the authorities or the actual policy implementation will be what the grievance group originally sought.vi

In the normal case, issues and proposals have a history whose course corresponds more to the first or second model than to the third. As long as the informal circulation of power dominates the political system, the initiative and power to put problems on the agenda and bring them to a deci- sion lies more with the Government leaders and administration than with the parliamentary com- plex. As long as in the public sphere the mass media prefer, contrary to their normative self- understanding, to draw their material from pow- erful, well-organized information producers and as long as they prefer media strategies that lower rather than raise the discursive level of public communication, issues will tend to start in, and be managed from, the center, rather than follow a spontaneous course originating in the periph- ery. At least, the skeptical findings on problem articulation in public arenas accord with this view. In the present context, of course, there can be no question of a conclusive empirical evalua- tion of the mutual influence that politics and public have on each other. For our purposes, it suffices to make it plausible that in a perceived crisis situation, the actors in civil society thus far neglected in our scenario can assume a surpris- ingly active and momentous role. In spite of a lesser organizational complexity and a weaker

vR. Cobb, J. K. Ross, and M. H. Ross, “Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process,” American Politi- cal Science Review 70 (1976): 126–38; R. Cobb and C. Elder, “The Politics of Agenda-Building,” Journal of Politics (1971): 892–915. viCobb, Ross, and Ross, “Agenda Building as a Comparative Political Process,” p. 132.

508  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

capacity for action, and despite the structural disadvantages mentioned earlier, at the critical moments of an accelerated history, these actors get the chance to reverse the normal circuits of communication in the political system and the public sphere. In this way they can shift the entire system’s mode of problem solving.

The communication structures of the public sphere are linked with the private life spheres in a way that gives the civil-social periphery, in con- trast to the political center, the advantage of greater sensitivity in detecting and identifying new problem situations. The great issues of the last decades give evidence for this. Consider, for example, the spiraling nuclear-arms race; consider the risks involved in the peaceful use of atomic energy or in other large-scale technological proj- ects and scientific experimentation, such as genetic engineering; consider the ecological threats involved in an overstrained natural envi- ronment (acid rain, water pollution, species extinction, etc.); consider the dramatically pro- gressing impoverishment of the Third World and problems of the world economic order; or con- sider such issues as feminism, increasing immi- gration, and the associated problems of multicul- turalism. Hardly any of these topics were initially brought up by exponents of the state apparatus, large organizations, or functional systems. Instead, they were broached by intellectuals, concerned citizens, radical professionals, self-proclaimed “advocates,” and the like. Moving in from this outermost periphery, such issues force their way into newspapers and interested associations, clubs, professional organizations, academies, and universities. They find forums, citizen initiatives, and other platforms before they catalyze the growth of social movements and new subcul- tures. The latter can in turn dramatize contribu- tions, presenting them so effectively that the mass media take up the matter. Only through their controversial presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and subsequently gain a place on the “public agenda.” Sometimes the support of sensational actions, mass protests, and incessant campaigning is required before an issue can make its way via the surprising election of marginal candidates or radical parties, expanded platforms of “established” parties, important court decisions, and so on, into the core of the political system and there receive formal consideration.

Naturally, there are other ways in which issues develop, other paths from the periphery to the center, and other patterns involving complex branchings and feedback loops. But, in general, one can say that even in more or less power- ridden public spheres, the power relations shift as soon as the perception of relevant social prob- lems evokes a crisis consciousness at the periph- ery. If actors from civil society then join together, formulate the relevant issue, and promote it in the public sphere, their efforts can be successful, because the endogenous mobilization of the pub- lic sphere activates an otherwise latent depen- dency built into the internal structure of every public sphere, a dependency also present in the normative self-understanding of the mass media: the players in the arena owe their influence to the approval of those in the gallery. At the very least, one can say that insofar as a rationalized life- world supports the development of a liberal public sphere by furnishing it with a solid foun- dation in civil society, the authority of a position- taking public is strengthened in the course of escalating public controversies. Under the condi- tions of a liberal public sphere, informal public communication accomplishes two things in cases in which mobilization depends on crisis. On the one hand, it prevents the accumulation of indoc- trinated masses that are seduced by populist leaders. On the other hand, it pulls together the scattered critical potentials of a public that was only abstractly held together through the public media, and it helps this public have a political influence on institutionalized opinion- and will- formation. Only in liberal public spheres, of course, do subinstitutional political move- ments—which abandon the conventional paths of interest politics in order to boost the constitu- tionally regulated circulation of power in the political system—take this direction. By con- trast, an authoritarian, distorted public sphere that is brought into alignment merely provides a forum for plebiscitary legitimation.

This sense of reinforced demand for legitima- tion becomes especially clear when subinstitu- tional protest movements reach a high point by escalating their protests. The last means for obtaining more of a hearing and greater media influence for oppositional arguments are acts of civil disobedience. These acts of nonviolent, symbolic rule violation are meant as expressions

Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  509

of protest against binding decisions that, their legality notwithstanding, the actors consider illegitimate in the light of valid constitutional principles. Acts of civil disobedience are directed simultaneously to two addressees. On the one hand, they appeal to officeholders and parliamentary representatives to reopen for- mally concluded political deliberations so that their decisions may possibly be revised in view of the continuing public criticism. On the other hand, they appeal “to the sense of justice of the majority of the community,” as Rawls puts it,vii and thus to the critical judgment of a public of citizens that is to be mobilized with exceptional means. Independently of the current object of controversy, civil disobedience is also always an implicit appeal to connect organized politi- cal will-formation with the communicative pro- cesses of the public sphere. The message of this subtext is aimed at a political system that, as constitutionally organized, may not detach itself from civil society and make itself inde- pendent vis-à-vis the periphery. Civil disobedi- ence thereby refers to its own origins in a civil society that in crisis situations actualizes the normative contents of constitutional democracy in the medium of public opinion and summons it against the systemic inertia of institutional politics. . . .

This interpretation of civil disobedience man- ifests the self-consciousness of a civil society confident that at least in a crisis it can increase the pressure of a mobilized public on the politi- cal system to the point where the latter switches into the conflict mode and neutralizes the unof- ficial countercirculation of power.

Beyond this, the justification of civil disobe- dience relies on a dynamic understanding of the constitution as an unfinished project. From this long-term perspective, the constitutional state does not represent a finished structure but a delicate and sensitive—above all fallible and revisable—enterprise, whose purpose is to real- ize the system of rights anew in changing circumstances, that is, to interpret the system of rights better, to institutionalize it more appropri- ately, and to draw out its contents more radically. This is the perspective of citizens who are actively engaged in realizing the system of rights. Aware of, and referring to, changed con- texts, such citizens want to overcome in practice the tension between social facticity and validity. Although legal theory cannot adopt this partici- pant perspective as its own, it can reconstruct the paradigmatic understanding of law and democ- racy that guides citizens whenever they form an idea of the structural constraints on the self-orga- nization of the legal community in their society.

viiJ. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), p. 364.

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Introduction to “The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society”

In this selection, Habermas extends his analysis of the public sphere into a more general theory of communication in modern societies. Central to the essay are several key concepts: system, lifeworld, uncoupling, the colonization of the lifeworld, and communicative action. In Habermas’s account, all societies can be understood theoretically as composed of two primary components—the system and the lifeworld. The system is that set of interrelated social structures, like the state and economy, that form the primary basis for the organization of social life. The lifeworld is the arena of everyday, human interaction carved out of ongo- ing and negotiated interpersonal communication.

Habermas suggests that an optimally functioning society is one in which systemic pro- cesses are neatly coupled with the lifeworld dynamics of everyday communication and consensus formation. Such interrelations allow for rationalized and differentiated system- level structures to emerge that are grounded in and guided by the critical and communicative demands of the lifeworld. Habermas argues, however, that in the modern world, system and lifeworld have become “uncoupled,” resulting in the emergence of “steering crises” and

510  SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY ERA

“pathologies in the lifeworld.” The most striking disturbance has been within the lifeworld, which has been “colonized” by reified and increasingly self-insulated systemic processes. The result of this “colonization of the lifeworld” is that system-level institutions, most nota- bly economic institutions and governments, operate with virtual autonomy from the norma- tive checks and balances that can only emanate from the lifeworld, and that the lifeworld itself has become radically deformed. Here, the “steering media” that guide systemic insti- tutional processes (money and power) penetrate the lifeworld and displace meaningful social interaction and symbolic communication as a primary basis for social relationships. It is the “task of a critical theory of society” to critique existing social structures in order to rebalance the relationship between system and lifeworld and thus create the conditions nec- essary for producing a free and democratic social order.

Habermas places his hopes for the emancipation of humanity in the counterweight of social movements and, in particular, the power of communicative action. While the system is steered by money and power and a form of instrumental rationality that emphasizes effi- ciency and means over ends, communicative action emanates from within the lifeworld. As such, communicative action is grounded in a distinct form of rationality (i.e., “communica- tive rationality”) that makes possible a discourse capable of generating social solidarity, mutual understandings, and personal and collective identities. For their part, new social movements mount protests and give air to public opinion in an effort to defend and restore “endangered ways of life” that cannot be secured through money and power. Rather, the conflicts they give voice to “arise in domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization.” Their aims speak not to economic or political transformations but, rather, to reestablishing control over “the grammar of forms of life.”

In respects a theory of capitalist modernization developed by some means of a theory of com- municative action does follow the Marxian model. It is critical both of contemporary social sciences and of the social reality they are sup- posed to grasp. It is critical of the reality of developed societies inasmuch as they do not make full use of the learning potential culturally available to them, but deliver themselves over to an uncontrolled growth of complexity. . . . This increasing system complexity encroaches upon nonrenewable supplies like a quasinatural force; not only does it out-flank traditional forms of life, it attacks the communicative infrastructure of largely rationalized lifeworlds. But the theory is also critical of social-scientific approaches that are incapable of deciphering the paradoxes of

societal rationalization because they make com- plex social systems their object only from one or another abstract point of view, without account- ing for the historical constitution of their object domain (in the sense of a reflexive sociology). Critical social theory does not relate to estab- lished lines of research as a competitor; starting from its concept of the rise of modern societies, it attempts to explain the specific limitations and the relative rights of those approaches.

If we leave to one side the insufficiently com- plex approach of behaviorism, there are today three main lines of inquiry occupied with the phenomenon of modern societies. We cannot even say that they are in competition, for they scarcely have anything to say to one another. Efforts at theory comparison do not issue in

“The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society” (1987)

Jürgen Habermas

SOURCE: “The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society” from The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason by Jürgen Habermas. Introduction and English trans- lation, copyright © 1987 by Beacon Press. German text, copyright © 1981 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press via The Copyright Clearance Center.

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Contemporary Theoretical Syntheses  511

reciprocal critique; fruitful critique that might foster a common undertaking can hardly be developed across these distances, but at most within one or another camp. There is a good reason for this mutual incomprehension: the object domains of the competing approaches do not come into contact, for they are the result of one-sided abstractions that unconsciously cut the ties between system and lifeworld constitutive for modern societies. . . .

Whereas the theory of structural differentia- tion does not sufficiently separate systemic and lifeworld aspects, systems theory and action theory, each isolates and overgeneralizes one of the two aspects. The methodological abstractions have the same result in all three cases. The theo- ries of modernity made possible by these approaches remain insensitive to what Marx called “real abstractions”; the latter can be gotten at through an analysis that at once traces the rationalization of lifeworlds and the growth in complexity of media-steered subsystems, and that keeps the paradoxical nature of their inter- ference in sight. As we have seen, it is possible to speak in a nonmetaphorical sense of paradoxi- cal conditions of life if the structural differentia- tion of lifeworlds is described as rationalization. Social pathologies are not to be measured against “biological” goal states but in relation to the contradictions in which communicatively inter- meshed interaction can get caught because deception and self-deception can gain objective power in an everyday practice reliant on the fac- ticity of validity claims.

By “real abstractions” Marx was referring not only to paradoxes experienced by those involved as deformations of their lifeworld, but above all to paradoxes that could be gotten at only through an analysis of reification (or of rationalization). It is in this latter sense that we call “paradoxical” those situations in which systemic relief mecha- nisms made possible by the rationalization of the lifeworld turn around and overburden the com- municative infrastructure of the lifeworld. After attempting to render a fourth approach to inquiry—the genetic structuralism of develop- mental psychology—fruitful for appropriating Weber’s sociology of religion, Mead’s theory of communication, and Durkheim’s theory of social integration, I proposed that we read the Weberian rationalization thesis in that way. The basic

conceptual framework I developed by these means was, naturally, not meant to be an end in itself; rather, it has to prove itself against the task of explaining those pathologies of modernity that other approaches pass right by for method- ological reasons. . . .

With these illustrative remarks I also intend to emphasize the fully open character and the flex- ibility of an approach to social theory whose fruitfulness can be confirmed only in the ramifi- cations of social and philosophical research. As to what social theory can accomplish in and of itself—it resembles the focusing power of a magnifying glass. Only when the social sciences no longer sparked a single thought would the time for social theory be past.

(a) On the forms of integration in postliberal societies. Occidental rationalism arose within the framework of bourgeois capitalist societies. For this reason, following Marx and Weber I have examined the initial conditions of modernization in connection with societies of this type and have traced the capitalist path of development. In postliberal societies there is a fork in this path: modernization pushes forward in one direction through endogenously produced problems of economic accumulation, in the other through problems arising from the state’s efforts at ratio- nalization. Along the developmental path of organized capitalism, a political order of welfare-state mass democracy took shape. In some places, however, under the pressure of eco- nomic crises, the mode of production, threatened by social disintegration, could be maintained for a time only in the political form of authoritarian or fascist orders. Along the developmental path of bureaucratic socialism a political order of dicta- torship by state parties took shape. . . . If we per- mit ourselves to simplify in an ideal-typical man- ner and limit ourselves to the two dominant variants of postliberal societies, and if we start from the assumption that alienation phenomena arise as systemically induced deformations of the lifeworld, then we can take a few steps toward a comparative analysis of principles of societal organizations, kinds of crisis tendencies, and forms of social pathology.

On our assumption, a considerably rational- ized lifeworld is one of the initial conditions for modernization processes. It must be possible to

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anchor money and power in the lifeworld as media, that is, to institutionalize them by means of positive law. If these conditions are met, eco- nomic and administrative systems can be differ- entiated out, systems that have a complementary relation to one another and enter into inter- changes with their environments via steering media. At this level of system differentiation modern societies arise, first capitalist societies, and later—setting themselves off from those— bureaucratic-socialist societies. A capitalist path of modernization opens up as soon as the eco- nomic system develops its own intrinsic dynamic of growth and, with its endogenously produced problems, takes the lead, that is, the evolutionary primacy, for society as a whole. The path of modernization runs in another direction when, on the basis of state ownership of most of the means of production and an institutionalized one-party rule, the administrative action system gains a like autonomy in relation to the economic system.

To the extent that these organizational princi- ples are established, there arise interchange rela- tions between the two functionally interlocked subsystems and the societal components of the lifeworld in locked subsystems and the societal components of the lifeworld in which the media are anchored. The lifeworld, more or less relieved of tasks of material reproduction, can in turn become more differentiated in its symbolic struc- tures and can set free the inner logic of develop- ment of cultural modernity. At the same time, the private and public spheres are now set off as the environments of the system. According to whether the economic system or the state appara- tus attains evolutionary primacy, either private households or politically relevant memberships are the points of entry for crises that are shifted from the subsystems to the lifeworld. In modernized societies disturbances in the material reproduction of the lifeworld take the form of stubborn systemic disequilibria; the latter either take effect directly as crises or they call forth pathologies in the lifeworld.

Steering crises were first studied in connec- tion with the business cycle of market econo- mies. In bureaucratic socialism, crisis tendencies spring from self-blocking mechanisms in plan- ning administrations, as they do on the other side from endogenous interruptions of accumulation

processes. Like the paradoxes of exchange ratio- nality, the paradoxes of planning rationality can be explained by the fact that rational action ori- entations come into contradiction with them- selves through unintended systemic effects. These crisis tendencies are worked through not only in the subsystem in which they arise, but also in the complementary action system into which they can be shifted. Just as the capitalist economy relies on organizational performances of the state, the socialist planning bureaucracy has to rely on self-steering performances of the economy. Developed capitalism swings between the contrary policies of “the market’s self-healing powers” and state interventionism. The structural dilemma is even clearer on the other side, where policy oscillates hopelessly between increased central planning and decen- tralization, between orienting economic programs toward investment and toward consumption.

These systemic disequilibria become crises only when the performances of economy and state remain manifestly below an established level of aspiration and harm the symbolic repro- duction of the lifeworld by calling forth conflicts and reactions of resistance there. It is the societal components of the lifeworld that are directly affected by this. Before such conflicts threaten core domains of social integration, they are pushed to the periphery—before anomic condi- tions arise there are appearances of withdrawal of legitimation or motivation. But when steering crises—that is, perceived disturbances of mate- rial reproduction—are successfully intercepted by having recourse to lifeworld resources, pathologies arise in the lifeworld. These resources appear as contributions to cultural reproduction, social integration, and socializa- tion. For the continued existence of the economy and the state, it is the resources that contribute to the maintenance of society that are relevant, for it is here, in the institutional orders of the life- world, that subsystems are anchored.

We can represent the replacement of steering crises with lifeworld pathologies as follows: anomic conditions are avoided, and legitimations and motivations important for maintaining insti- tutional orders are secured, at the expense of, and through the ruthless exploitation of, other resources. Culture and personality come under attack for the sake of warding off crises and

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stabilizing society. Instead of manifestations of anomie (and instead of the withdrawal of legiti- mation and motivation in place of anomie), phe- nomena of alienation and the unsettling of col- lective identity emerge. I have traced such phe- nomena back to a colonization of the lifeworld and characterized them as a reification of the communicative practice of everyday life.

However, deformations of the lifeworld take the form of a reification of communicative rela- tions only in capitalist societies, that is, only where the private household is the point of incur- sion for the displacement of crises into the life- world. This is not a question of the overextension of a single medium but of the monetarization and bureaucratization of the sphere of action of employees and of consumers, of citizens and of clients of state bureaucracies. Deformations of the lifeworld take a different form in societies in which the points of incursion for the penetration of crises into the lifeworld are politically relevant memberships. There too, in bureaucratic-socialist societies, domains of action that are dependent on social integration are switched over to mecha- nisms of system integration. But instead of the reification of communicative relations we find the shamming of communicative relations in bureaucratically desiccated, forcibly “human- ized” domains of pseudopolitical intercourse in an overextended and administered public sphere. This pseudopoliticization is symmetrical to reify- ing privatization in certain respects. The life- world is not directly assimilated to the system, that is, to legally regulated, formally organized domains of action; rather, systemically self- sufficient organizations are fictively put back into a simulated horizon of the lifeworld. While the system is draped out as the lifeworld, the life- world is absorbed by the system.

(b) Family socialization and ego development. The diagnosis of an uncoupling of system and lifeworld also offers a different perspective for judging the structural change in family, educa- tion, and personality development. For a psycho- analysis viewed from a Marxist standpoint, the theory of the Oedipus complex, interpreted sociologically, was pivotal for explaining how the functional imperatives of the economic sys- tem could establish themselves in the superego structures of the dominant social character. Thus,

for example, Löwenthal’s studies of drama and fiction in the nineteenth century served to show in detail that the constraints of the economic system—concentrated in status hierarchies, occupational roles, and gender stereotypes— penetrated into the innermost aspects of life his- tory via intra-familial dependencies and patterns of socialization. The intimacy of highly person- alized relations merely concealed the blind force of economic inter-dependencies that had become autonomous in relation to the private sphere—a force that was experienced as “fate.”

Thus the family was viewed as the agency through which systemic imperatives influenced our instinctual vicissitudes; its communicative internal structure was not taken seriously. Because the family was always viewed only from functionalist standpoints and was never given its own weight from structuralist points of view, the epochal changes in the bourgeois fam- ily could be misunderstood; in particular, the results of the leveling out of paternal authority could be interpreted wrongly. It seemed as if systemic imperatives now had the chance—by way of a mediatized family—to take hold directly of intrapsychic events, a process that the soft medium of mass culture could at most slow down. If, by contrast, we also recognize in the structural transformation of the bourgeois family the inherent rationalization of the lifeworld; if we see that, in egalitarian patterns of relation- ship, in individual forms of intercourse, and in liberalized child-rearing practices, some of the potential for rationality ingrained in communica- tive action is also released; then the changed conditions of socialization in the middle-class nuclear family appear in a different light.

Empirical indicators suggest the growing autonomy of a nuclear family in which socializa- tion processes take place through the medium of largely deinstitutionalized communicative action. Communicative infrastructures are devel- oping that have freed themselves from latent entanglements in systemic dependencies. The contrast between the homme who is educated to freedom and humanity in the intimate sphere and the citoyen who obeys functional necessities in the sphere of social labor was always an ideol- ogy. But it has now taken on a different meaning. Familial lifeworlds see the imperatives of the economic and administrative systems coming at

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them from outside, instead of being mediatized by them from behind. In the families and their environments we can observe a polarization between communicatively structured and for- mally organized domains of action; this places socialization processes under different condi- tions and exposes them to a different type of danger. This view is supported by two rough sociopsychological clues: the diminishing sig- nificance of the Oedipal problematic and the growing significance of adolescent crises.

For some time now, psychoanalytically trained physicians have observed a symptomatic change in the typical manifestations of illness. Classical hysterias have almost died out; the number of compulsion neuroses is drastically reduced; on the other hand, narcissistic distur- bances are on the increase. Christopher Lasch has taken this symptomatic change as the occa- sion for a diagnosis of the times that goes beyond the clinical domain.i It confirms the fact that the significant changes in the present escape socio- psychological explanations that start from the Oedipal problematic, from an internalization of societal repression which is simply masked by parental authority. The better explanations start from the premise that the communications struc- tures that have been set free in the family provide conditions for socialization that are as demand- ing as they are vulnerable. The potential for irri- tability grows, and with it the probability that instabilities in parental behavior will have a comparatively strong effect—a subtle neglect.

The other phenomenon, a sharpening of the adolescence problematic, also speaks for the socializatory significance of the uncoupling of system and lifeworld. Systemic imperatives do not so much insinuate themselves into the fam- ily, establish themselves in systematically dis- torted communication, and inconspicuously intervene in the formation of the self as, rather, openly come at the family from outside. As a result, there is a tendency toward disparities between competences, attitudes, and motives, on the one hand, and the functional requirements of adult roles on the other. The problem of detach- ing oneself from the family and forming one’s own identity has in any case turned adolescent

development (which is scarcely safeguarded by institutions anymore) into a critical test for the ability of the coming generation to connect up with the preceding one. When the conditions of socialization in the family are no longer func- tionally in tune with the organizational member- ship conditions that the growing child will one day have to meet, the problems that young peo- ple have to solve in their adolescence become insoluble for more and more of them. One indi- cation of this is the social and even political significance that youth protest and withdrawal cultures have gained since the end of the 1960s.

This new problem situation cannot be handled with the old theoretical means. If we connect the epochal changes in family socialization with the rationalization of the lifeworld, socializatory interaction becomes the point of reference for the analysis of ego development, and systematically distorted communication—the reification of interpersonal relations—the point of reference for investigating pathogenesis. The theory of communicative action provides a framework within which the structural model of ego, id, and superego can be recast. Instead of an instinct theory that represents the relation of ego to inner nature in terms of a philosophy of conscious- ness—on the model of relations between subject and object—we have a theory of socialization that connects Freud with Mead, gives structures of intersubjectivity their due, and replaces hypotheses about instinctual vicissitudes with assumptions about identity formation. This approach can (i) appropriate more recent devel- opments in psychoanalytic research, particularly the theory of object relations and ego psychol- ogy, (ii) take up the theory of defense mecha- nisms in such a way that the interconnections between intrapsychic communication barriers and communication disturbances at the interper- sonal level become comprehensible, and (iii) use the assumptions about mechanisms of conscious and unconscious mastery to establish a connec- tion between orthogenesis and pathogenesis. The cognitive and sociomoral development studied in the Piagetian tradition takes place in accord with structural patterns that provide a reliable foil for intuitively recorded clinical deviations.

iChristopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York, 1978).

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(c) Mass media and mass culture. With its dis- tinction between system and lifeworld, the theory of communicative action brings out the indepen- dent logic of socializatory interaction; the corre- sponding distinction between two contrary types of communication media makes us sensitive to the ambivalent potential of mass communica- tions. The theory makes us skeptical of the thesis that the essence of the public sphere has been liquidated in postliberal societies. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the communication flows steered via mass media take the place of those communication structures that had once made possible public discussion and self-under- standing by citizens and private individuals. With the shift from writing to images and sounds, the electronic media—first film and radio, later tele- vision—present themselves as an apparatus that completely permeates and dominates the lan- guage of everyday communication. On the one hand, it transforms the authentic content of mod- ern culture into the sterilized and ideologically effective stereotypes of a mass culture that merely replicates what exists; on the other hand, it uses up a culture cleansed of all subversive and tran- scending elements for an encompassing system of social controls, which is spread over individu- als, in part reinforcing their weakened internal behavioral controls, in part replacing them. The mode of functioning of the culture industry is said to be a mirror image of the psychic appara- tus, which, as long as the internalization of pater- nal authority was still functioning, had subjected instinctual nature to the control of the superego in the way that technology had subjected outer nature to its domination.

Against this theory we can raise the empirical objections that can always be brought against stylizing oversimplifications—that it proceeds ahistorically and does not take into consideration the structural change in the bourgeois public sphere; that it is not complex enough to take account of the marked national differences— from differences between private, public-legal, and state-controlled organizational structures of broadcasting agencies, to differences in pro- gramming, viewing practices, political culture, and so forth. But there is an even more serious objection, an objection in principle, that can be derived from the dualism of media discussed above.

I distinguished two sorts of media that can ease the burden of the (risky and demanding) coordinating mechanism of reaching understand- ing: on the one hand, steering media, via which subsystems are differentiated out of the life- world; on the other hand, generalized forms of communication, which do not replace reaching agreement in language but merely condense it, and thus remain tied to lifeworld contexts. Steer- ing media uncouple the coordination of action from building consensus in language altogether and neutralize it in regard to the alternative of coming to an agreement or failing to do so. In the other case we are dealing with a specialization of linguistic processes of consensus formation that remains dependent on recourse to the resources of the lifeworld background. The mass media belong to these generalized forms of communi- cation. They free communication processes from the provinciality of spatiotemporally restricted contexts and permit public spheres to emerge, through establishing the abstract simultaneity of a virtually present network of communication contents far removed in space and time and through keeping messages available for mani- fold contexts.

These media publics hierarchize and at the same time remove restrictions on the horizon of possible communication. The one aspect cannot be separated from the other—and therein lies their ambivalent potential. Insofar as mass media one-sidedly channel communication flows in a centralized network—from the center to the periphery or from above to below—they consid- erably strengthen the efficiency of social con- trols. But tapping this authoritarian potential is always precarious because there is a counter- weight of emancipatory potential built into com- munication structures themselves. Mass media can simultaneously contextualize and concen- trate processes of reaching understanding, but it is only in the first instance that they relieve interaction from yes/no responses to criticizable validity claims. Abstracted and clustered though they are, these communications cannot be reli- ably shielded from the possibility of opposition by responsible actors.

When communications research is not abridged in an empiricist manner and allows for dimensions of reification in communicative everyday practice, it confirms this ambivalence.