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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 40
to participation by all. In other words, a may to focus on quality may preclude
entire classes of people from participation. The tension is reflected in Kant’s
notions of “subtle reasoners,” and the actual inhabitants of the early bourgeois
public spheres – mainly educated, propertied men – who “conducted a discourase
not only exclusive of others but prejudicial to the interests of those excluded. Yet
the transformations of the public sphere that Habermas describes turn largely on
its continual expansion to include more and more participants (as well as on the
development of large scale social organizations as mediators of individual participation).”
Habermas claims that it was this “inclusivity” that ultimately leads to a
degeneration in the quality of the discourse.
2.5 The Informal Public Sphere
In Between Facts and Norms (1996), Habermas differentiates between the deliberative
or formal zone of the public sphere, and its nondeliberative or informal
counterpart, a distinction he suggests (307) is lacking in other accounts of deliberative
democracy 1 Distinctions between the two zones can be made in terms of
their functions and the criteria by which equality, diversity, reciprocity and quality
can be determined.This section will examine the two zones of the public sphere,
and suggest mechanisms for determining the degree to which both satisfy the demands
of the idealized public sphere.
The deliberative, formal zone of the public sphere incorporates the legislatures
and assemblies in which elected or appointed representatives serve. Formal procedures
govern the conduct of citizen interaction within these arenas, and the product
of their deliberations is usually legislation or some other formally structured
method of implementing what is perceived to be the public will. The deliberative
bodies are structured to generate cooperative solutions to political questions.
The procedures are designed to facilitate “justifying the selection of a problem
and the choice among competing proposals for solving it” (Habermas 1996, 307).
In Barber’s (1984) terms, the functions of political talk in deliberative zones are
bargaining and persuasion.
1 For example, Habermas (1996, 307) argues that the view of deliberative democracy advanced
by Cohen (1993) is “silent about the relation between decision-oriented deliberations, which are
regulated by democratic procedures, and the informal processes of opinion-formation in the public
sphere.”