Constellations-An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory最新文献

1. I first met Richard Bernstein in Frankfurt in the spring of 1988, where he was a visiting professor of philosophy while I was a student. I remember as truly eye-opening the seminar he taught together with Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel and the one he gave by himself on the authors he discussed in The New Constellation (1991). From that time on, this marvelous Geist became an important mentor for me and a dear friend, and I will always be grateful for this gift.

Dick used to refer to people he was fond of with the Yiddish mensch, meaning someone with a fine character and a certain knowledge of life based on experience. A great Aristotelian as he was, he inspires me to say that what a true mensch is one can hardly capture by a definition; rather, one has to point to an example. And I can think of no better example than Dick Bernstein himself, the warmest, most generous, wise, and dialogical person one could imagine.

2. This menschsein brings me to my topic, Bernstein's thinking about democracy. He was a true pragmatist, one of the greatest of his generation. This means that he approached issues in, say, political philosophy or epistemology not from separate methodological standpoints. Rather, for him all philosophical concepts and ideas had to be explained by reference to human practice and experience, and they found their place in a comprehensive philosophy of what he called the “dialogical character of our human existence” (Bernstein, 1983, p. xv). Democracy, from this perspective, was not simply a certain form of organizing political life, rather, it was an ethical way of life. Yet for Bernstein democracy was grounded more fundamentally still as a mode of thought—or better: as the form of thought that makes us truly human, and again the Aristotelianism in the formulation is no mistake. Bernstein was not a metaphysical foundationalist, and he tried to liberate us from “Cartesian anxieties,” but he firmly believed in the human potential and telos of us humans, and of us all, as dialogical seekers of understanding. In his eyes, all human practices, those of pursuing knowledge, of social cooperation and production (including art), or of finding a common opinion or will, had to be understood as practices of phronesis, as communal endeavors to organize our individual and collective lives through mutual understanding. This of course means rational understanding, taking rationality to be the capacity of constructing our reality through dialogue. I am interested in that core idea of his, as I believe there are important treasures to be found in what I call Bernstein's signature rationalism. One can say a lot about its anti-Cartesian or non-Kantian character, but a form of rationalism it is, as any proper Aristotelian view must.

3. The topics of praxis and phronesis occupied Bernstein throughout his career

It was nearly 50 years ago when Dick called me for the first time and invited me to come over to Haverford for a discussion. It is not only because of the beginning of our longstanding friendship that I start with that phone call I got in 1972 at the Humanities Center of Cornell University. It moreover led, at this first encounter, to a memorable and rather improbable discovery. The two of us had been brought up on different continents and in different societies, with different backgrounds at different schools and different universities, not to speak of a childhood and youth we spent on opposite sides of a monstrous World War, in which Dick had lost a brother; but in spite of all of these obvious distances in origin and socialization we soon discovered a broad overlap in our philosophical background and also in our present research interests. Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, Sartre and existentialism, even Peirce and Dewey and our present research programs in action theory and communication are the catch words to indicate this unexpected convergence of our philosophical orientations. And my surprise was soon confirmed when I read Dick's book Praxis and Action which I immediately recommended to Suhrkamp for translation.

However, the discovery of these intellectual family bonds is only half of the story; I would not have accepted the invitation to come to Haverford with Ute and our two daughters for a whole term, had Dick not been the impressive personality he indeed was—a host of overwhelming charm and an open-minded, spontaneous and inspiring partner in the ongoing ping-pong of arguments. Throughout the following years and decades, I got to know him as a sharp-minded, engaged and dedicated philosopher and teacher, as an attentive, sensitive and loyal friend and as a mind of great fairness and courage who got angry and immediately spoke up when he felt that somebody was not treated in the right way. And yet, even this friendship would not have flourished for such a long time if it had not been embedded in the broader context of relations between our families.

We enjoyed Carol's hospitality in her wide-open house, whether the families met at home—I remember our shy Judith dancing with little Daniel along the floor—or whether we were introduced to quite a few distinguished and interesting guests at dinner, first in Haverford, but in the same style later on at the upper Eastside in Manhattan or in the Adirondacks—where Dick finally spent his last days. During those memorable evenings, we met for example Jacques Derrida or Geoffrey Hartmann, or colleagues from Israel and elsewhere, who were teaching at the New School. By the way, this generous hospitality of the Bernsteins also included my son Tilmann and, my daughter, Rebekka, when they spent a year at the New School as Theodor Heuss professors. The visits were, of course, mutual: Dick has taught in Frankfurt several times; and I remember a last visit with him and Carol in Mu

Despite accumulating challenges, digital information and communication technologies retain considerable democratic potential. They have enabled movements, mass protests, and open-data initiatives in cities. But as we have all learned from the failures of an earlier wave of techno-utopianism, the democratic exploitation of technological affordances is deeply contingent—dependent on ethical conviction, political engagement, public regulation, and good design choices. In particular, and in the spirit of Habermas’ remark quoted at the outset, we think that the democratic potential will only be realized if participants in what we will be calling “the digital public sphere” deepen their sense of responsibility for how communication proceeds there.

A brief clarification: by “the digital public sphere,” we mean a public sphere in which discussion about matters of potentially shared concern is shaped in part by communication on online platforms (intermediaries that store users’ information and enable its public dissemination). Thus, the digital public sphere is neither everything that happens online or on online platforms (much of which is not discussion of matters of shared concern), nor is it only online. It is a public sphere in which communication on platforms plays an important role in shaping public discussion.

We will begin by sketching an idealized democratic public sphere, which marries inclusion and deliberation. Our current digitalized public sphere is dramatically more inclusive than the post-war mass media public sphere. But this expansion of inclusion has come at a substantial deliberative price. To improve the quality of public discussion, we focus on the responsibilities that participants must take on for the digital public sphere to be more democratically successful.

To be sure, participant action is insufficient. We and others have offered suggestions for the contributions of regulation, corporate responsibility, and the contributions of researchers, as well as civic and advocacy organizations. The European Union's new regulations on Intermediary Services, for example, the Digital Services Act, include requirements on illegal content and impose due diligence responsibilities on very large online platforms that will need to do audited systematic risk assessments and offer plans for remediation (Husovec & Roche Laguna, 2022). This approach has much to be said for it (though with the proliferation of generative models, it may be addressed to last year's problems). But because the digital public sphere has vastly expanded the aperture for contributions to discussion, and because we are uneasy about regulating the substance of public discussion, we are skeptical about proposals to turn public regulators or platforms (or any other agents) into editorial guardians.

Emphasizing participant responsibilities may give the appearance that we are at once blaming and burdening the victims of degraded public

In recent years, scholarly discourse has been dominated by concerns about the political public sphere: fake news and conspiracy theories are seen to have gained credence in “the age of social media,” strong polarization characterizes public debates even in established democracies, and, information abundance notwithstanding, more and more people appear to be disengaged from political news. In addition, print is unlikely to have a future; the prospects look equally bleak for linear TV programs. While more voices can permeate the public debate, only a handful of media enterprises are in control of the information market. Again, the field has turned to Jürgen Habermas’ groundbreaking perspective on the structural changes of the public sphere, first published more than 60 years ago. As before, it is displaying theoretical strength: better than any other approach, it seems capable of showing us the bigger picture. On top of that, Habermas again took up his seminal analysis in his latest contribution to political theory, a small book on the New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 2022). In the book, Habermas emphasizes again the relevance of public discourse and deliberation for contemporary democracy and criticizes, rightly so, the distortions that capitalist structures and economic logic cause for democratic processes.

While many of the patterns Habermas described in the original version of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1992 [1962]) are still relevant,¹ it is also necessary to consider what has changed. On the one hand, this means examining aspects that have varied in Habermas’ analyses. On the other hand, it means including aspects that are missing entirely from his reflections. To these ends, my remarks first look at the role of journalists and other actors in the public sphere. Despite the persistence of economic interests in mass media organizations, Habermas’ latest work sometimes appears nostalgic for mass media journalism's democratic performance while neglecting the achievements or potentials of non-professional actors on digital media platforms. Drawing on the concept of “opinion leadership,” I argue instead that we should concentrate our evaluations of the digital public sphere not only on professional expertise and norms, but also on the merits of independence, the ethos of community dedication, and on what determines trustworthiness.

Second, my contribution focuses on the “sub-structures” of the public sphere that do not play an important role in Habermas’ reflections, but which influence democratic processes in manifold ways. Digital media not only reinforce economic concentration, lead to a fragmentation of the political sphere, and provoke a less rational style of discourse. They also draw public attention away from the local or regional level and towards high-level politic, which—at the same time—provokes widespread depoliticiz

As someone who works interdisciplinarily between media and communication studies and sociology with an overall interest in critical social theory, Habermas’ “most successful” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 145) book is important in at least three respects: He develops a normative, critical concept of the public sphere and the formation of public opinion, which aims at democratizing domination, that is ties it to a process of unrestricted discussion of questions of general interest involving all those affected. The development of this possibility, but also the transformation and disintegration of the public sphere, is sociologically embedded, that is, considered in the light of changing socio-spatial frames of reference, mediatization, and political-economic developments (cf. Seeliger & Sevignani, 2022). Habermas, like few in critical social theory, is concerned with the organization and political economy of the media.¹ It was therefore a great honor that he not only contributed a commentary to texts edited by Martin Seeliger and me (first in German: Habermas, 2021, then also in English: Habermas, 2022a), but even wrote an independent text, which is now also available as a book together with smaller texts (Habermas, 2022b).

Against this background, I was very pleased to be invited to participate in this symposium on his new book. In this contribution, I will first, according to Habermas, briefly sketch the role of the public sphere in liberal-representative political systems and its transformation during the rise of digital communication. Then, I will point to a notable tension, immanent to Habermas new reflections, between, on the one hand, the normative goal of communicative learning and development and, on the other hand, his affirmation of “editorial tutelage.” This tension, I think, presses to repose the question of ideology again that Habermas has removed from and at best locates outside the public sphere. By making the gate-keeper paradigm of mass-media communication as a yardstick to evaluate the ongoing transformations, Habermas tends to misjudge the quality of digital semi-public spheres. Not the lack of generalization, I argue finally, but a different, emancipatory, form of generalization is the core problem of public opinion formation.

In his new reflections, Habermas recapitulates—in a concise but accessible form—his approach to critical theory as reconstructive critique (1), his “sociological translation” (Habermas, 1996, p. 315) of the political public sphere (2), and the effects brought about on this same public sphere by social media (3). This final point probably accounts for the great attention that the text has already received.

First, Habermas reconstructs, starting from the late 18th century, the rational but incompletely realized content of a modern subjectivity that sees itself as free, equal, and wanting to shape its fut

In September 2022, 60 years after he first released the German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik). This “new engagement with an old theme” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) has been a long time coming. Not only is STPS—as Habermas wrote in the dedication when he signed my English edition in 2008—“my first and still best-selling book (a kind of self-criticism),” in this new volume he also notes that it has “remained my most successful to date” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 145). This contribution is significant both given the broad reach of the concept of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) and due to the growing interest in how the rise of the internet and digital media has affected public deliberation and the public realm more generally.

Scholars of Habermas are used to reading long books. This expectation was confirmed in 2019 with the publication of Also a History of Philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie), which ran a total of 1752 pages across two volumes. By contrast, this bright orange book—which comes in at a slim 109 pages—refutes that same tendency. Additionally, aside from the short Foreword, all three chapters have been published in English elsewhere with only slight modifications.¹ In part, as Habermas points out, this brevity is due to the fact that he has “long been dealing with other issues” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) and thus is not up to date on the literature. Additionally, given that he already apologized to his readers for not writing a third (!) volume of his aforementioned study of the relationship between faith and knowledge as “my strength is simply no longer sufficient for that (dafür reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus)” (Habermas, 2019, p. I.10), his advanced age is also a likely a factor, despite his continued and active participation in both scholarly debate and in the German public sphere.

Habermas’ original study of the public sphere worked at three distinct, but interrelated levels. First, it told a story of the historical rise of the public sphere in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, focusing specifically on French salons, English coffeehouses and German Tischgesellschaften (table societies). Second, it presented a sociological model of the public sphere as a space for critical-rational discussion about matters of public interest to all citizens that opened between the “private realm” of self-interested bourgeois individuals and the “sphere of public authority” defined by the state and the court (the society of nobles). Finally, Habermas developed a normative political theory that sought to achieve “a systematic comprehensi