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

Habermas's new book, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,¹ offers a timely and insightful analysis of the threats that online communication poses to the maintenance of an inclusive public sphere in democratic societies. Amid growing discontent with democracy, there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the increasing deterioration of the political public sphere. In addition to long-standing threats such as the excessive influence of money in political discourse, the potential for manipulation by powerful social groups, and the exclusion of marginalized voices from public discourse, technological innovations such as social media platforms and big data collection are generating new types of threats.

These threats are being generated more quickly than society's ability to cope with them. The business model of social media platforms is based on maximizing user engagement through data harvesting and algorithmic personalization. The preselection of content for users based on data about their past preferences facilitates the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers with the consequence that those who rely mainly on social media almost never receive information, news, or opinions that they do not already agree with. These features of social media not only increase group isolation, fragmentation, and polarization but also facilitate the dissemination of misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, and the micro-targeted manipulation of voters.

Amid these threatening developments, we are seeing a decline in traditional media outlets that operate under journalistic norms of impartiality, accuracy, accountability, and so on. Consequently, it is unclear how citizens can stay sufficiently politically informed to engage in meaningful debate with their fellow citizens, even on the most fundamental political problems facing them. At this historical juncture, the danger that a shared sense of community among the citizenry disappears seems alarmingly real. Yet, democratic self-government is only possible if citizens can forge a collective political will by changing one another's hearts and minds in public debate. Without an inclusive public sphere, citizens cannot keep the democracies they have got.²

This concern is at the core of Habermas's analysis of the role of social media communication in bringing about a new structural transformation of the public sphere. Indeed, Habermas identifies the inclusive character of the public sphere as the feature that is most in danger of “disappearing” due to the centrifugal forces of social media communication which yield increased fragmentation, polarization, misinformation, and so on.³ I share Habermas's concern. I am convinced by his analysis of the distinctive threats that social media communication poses to the maintenance of an inclusive public sphere. I also agree with the two main mechanisms that he identifies as most promisi

In his political interventions, Jürgen Habermas is a first-class rhetorician. His writing style is eloquent, polemical, rich in aperçus and metaphors, and often affective, especially angry (see Möllers, 2021, p. 85). But there are also many metaphors in his contributions to philosophy, social theory, and political theory in which he clearly restrains himself rhetorically. Metaphors appear at crucial points in his theory formation. Formulations like the dialogical give and take of reasons “in kleiner Münze” (small coins), the discursive “Verflüssigung” (liquefaction) of traditions, the “colonization” of the lifeworld, the “center and periphery” of modern democracies, or their institutional “sluices”—a metaphor he has adopted from Bernhard Peters—create suggestive images in the minds of his readers. The author, who insists on the strict differentiation between day-to-day language, literary language, and the language of the social sciences (see Habermas, 1990a), and whose philosophical self-understanding insists on the “unforced force of the better argument” is a master of evocative metaphors. This attribute alone makes it a pleasure to read his texts.

The German edition of his new book does not disappoint those readers in search of metaphors either. In the Marxist tradition (see Marx, 2011), a number of metaphors are borrowed from the sphere of geology: “segments” (p. 33)¹ of the population, “erosion” of democracy (p. 87), normative “slopes” (p. 15), the “crumbling” of the political system (p. 109), or the “solidified lava” of anti-authoritarianism in Silicon Valley (p. 46). Some of the metaphors are nautical like normative “anchors” (p. 16), or from the theatre, like the “grimace” of libertarian political thought (p. 46). Only a few of them belong to organic life: the “root ground” of political culture (p. 32), the “Gleichursprünglichkeit” (co-originality) of democracy and the rule of law (p. 90), or the “nesting” of normative expectations (p. 14). Most of Habermas’ metaphors belong to the vocabulary of the technical world: the “building” of modern democracy (p. 9), “centrifugal” forms of communication (p. 43), the “architecture” of constitutional democracy (p. 32), the “net of historical memory” (p. 30), the “Sollbruchstelle” (predetermined breaking point) of political rights (p. 92), the “web of attitudes” (p. 30), the “social bond” (p. 31), civil society as an “early warning system” (p. 80)—and again the “flow chart” of the political system and its “filters” and “sluices” (p. 24, 100). One has to wait until the last paragraph of the book to find a military metaphor. Now is the time “den Spieß umzudrehen”² (p. 109) and fight the coalition of conspiracy theorists and right-wing populists.

Taking Habermas’ preference for technical metaphors into account, it comes as no surprise that he has speaks of “echo chambers” (p. 45) and “fragmentat

Political communication and opinion formation have always been central topics in democratic theory. Today, all eyes are on the new digital landscape and the ways that it is affecting these central elements of democracy. The diagnosis in both the popular press and scholarly research is that the digital revolution has been anything but good for democracy: “Today conventional wisdom holds that technologies have brought the world addictive devices, an omnipresent surveillance panopticon, racist algorithms, and disinformation machines that exacerbate polarization, threatening to destroy democracies from within” (Bernholz et al., 2021, p. 3). Assessing the threat of the present information revolution is especially relevant for theories of deliberative democracy that place communication and deliberation at the center of the democratic system.

In this essay, I focus on Jürgen Habermas’ version of deliberative democracy and the assessment of the digitalization of the public sphere that follows from it (Habermas 2022c). This assessment identifies fragmentation and privatization as the most serious threats to a properly functioning public sphere. While I agree that fragmentation and privatization are threats to the democratic function of public sphere, I question whether digitalization is their primary cause and suggest that we should be focusing on political actors who intentionally pursue strategies that fragment and polarize the public sphere. Thus, the culprit here is not so much technology and acquisitive platforms as authoritarian political elite intent on dulling the power of the public sphere to hold political actors to account.

Deliberative democracy is a broad research paradigm. Very generally, it can be described as a “talk-centric” rather than “vote-centric” view of democracy (Chambers, 2003, p. 308) in which democracy is studied and evaluated “from the point of view of the quality of the processes through which individuals come to discuss, debate and mutually justify their respective stances before voting or taking other sorts of political action” (Scudder & White, 2023, p. 12). This central normative core has been developed, studied, and theorized at what might be called two levels of democracy. On one level, we see the development and indeed proliferation of citizen deliberative initiatives. These concrete exercises in deliberative democracy bring citizens together in face-to-face designed settings with good information, trained moderators, and procedural norms that promote participant equality in the deliberative and decision-making process. Here, deliberation is a practice structured within an institution. There are thousands of these initiatives across all democracies, and within non-democracies, with immense variation in design and function (Farrell & Curato, 2021). Their use and insertion into democratic systems is on the rise and, in many places, sig

In contemporary debates about the crisis of democracy, it is often said that we are living in a time of an anti-democratic regression, and insofar as it is a phenomenon that develops within democratic systems, this is also called “democratic regression,” as Armin Schäfer and Michael Zürn (2021) do.¹ I think this addresses a crucial dimension of the critical analysis of our present, but I also see the need for further conceptual reflection and clarification. For “regression” is a complex concept with many connotations, and its usage must be considered carefully, in particular because it is important to avoid several fallacies in the discussion about it, of which I discuss three—that of the status quo ante fixation (Section 2), that of the reduction of the concept of democracy (Section 3), and that of the misclassification of critiques of democracy (Section 4). These considerations lead to my own assessment of the causes of democratic regression (Section 5).

I begin with some remarks on the concepts of crisis and regression. A crisis is the moment in which the fate of a person or a society is decided, when there is no more going back and not yet a way forward. It marks, as Schleiermacher (1984/1799) says, the “border between two different orders of things” (“Grenze […] zwischen zwei verschiedenen Ordnungen der Dinge,” p. 325). The old is dying, and the new cannot be born, as Gramsci (1996/1930, p. 33) puts it. One should, therefore, be cautious about talking of a crisis of democracy (in distinction to a crisis within democracy, or a crisis that democracy has to cope with) because this is the situation where it seriously teeters on the brink whether it will last.

With regard to socio-political orders, I distinguish between two types of crisis (cf. Forst, 2021, Chap. 12 and 16). A structural crisis occurs when the order is structurally no longer able to fulfill its tasks. We ascertain a crisis of justification when the self-understanding of an order shifts so that it loses its very own concept. Then, authoritarian political visions can emerge under the guise of democratic rhetoric, for example, in movements that proclaim “We are the people” but really mean “Foreigners out.” If such movements are understood as democratic, we experience a crisis of justification that can lead to regression.

Regression is a weighty concept when applied to societies, not only, but especially since the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which states that the “curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002/1944, p. 28). Drawing on psychoanalysis,² Horkheimer and Adorno (2002/1944) do not merely mean the “impoverishment of thought no less than of experience” (p. 28), but also a regression behind forms of civilization to the point of “barbarism,” into a world in which ideological

Asked whether he stands to his rather optimistic reassessment of the public sphere from 30 years earlier, Jürgen Habermas hinted in an interview in 2020 that he himself would not undertake an attempt to renew his seminal theory of the democratic public sphere. Fortunately for us political theorists, he reversed course shortly thereafter. Although just as a reaction to the edited volume by Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani, the essay Habermas wrote presents his most elaborate explanation of how he thinks about the digital transformation and the way it affects the democratic public sphere (Habermas, 2022a, in English: 2022b).

In what follows, I want to zoom in on the question of how Habermas approaches digital communication and its societal effects. Like others in this symposium, I have read Habermas’ new essay mostly as a re-assessment of his normative outlook on the overall trajectory of the public sphere in Western liberal democracies. In this respect, the essay represents a break with the trend toward an increasingly positive assessment of the resilience and self-healing powers of democratic publics. To some extent, Habermas returns to the original story of decay of the public sphere which characterized his original work in 1962. Without questioning Habermas’ diagnosis as a whole, I differentiate the effects of the digital constellation on democracy and the public sphere, pointing out counterforces, opportunities for regulation, and a more optimistic conclusion.¹

I will proceed in three steps. First, I will reconstruct how Habermas’ thinking on digital communication has developed in comparison to earlier statements on the matter. Second, I will discuss how the analysis can be challenged and extended by placing it in the context of the wider debate on democracy and digitalization. Third, I will comment on the conclusions that Habermas draws at the end of the essay.

For a long time, Habermas’ 2006 article “Does Democracy still have an epistemic dimension?” (Habermas, 2006) had been the most elaborate reassessment of his public sphere theory. In this piece, Habermas updated his two central writings on the public sphere from the 1990s: the foreword to the re-issue of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1990) and the respective chapters in Between Facts and Norms (Habermas, 1992). Both can themselves be read as updates of Habermas 1962 classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

In these texts, Habermas not only elaborated on his views about the public sphere and the institutions of democracy; his outlook on the development of the mass media public sphere also brightened significantly. While The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere tells a story of decay, his newer writings take their cue from the workings of an established and self-reflexive German democracy, whe