WIDE PUBLIC REASON: HABERMAS AND THE FACT OF PLURALISM

James Bohman, Saint Louis University (III-A)

As does Rawls in Political Liberalism, in Between Facts and Norms Habermas takes certain social facts to be unavoidable constraints on the construction of a feasible and normative political theory. According to Habermas, no normatively adequate conception of politics or law can be developed independently of a descriptively adequate model of the complexity of contemporary society. Rawls and Habermas agree on more than just this methodological point: they also agree substantively about what the relevant social facts are, including the fact of pluralism (or cultural and religious diversity in "ethical beliefs" or "reasonable comprehensive doctrines") and the fact of oppression (that given pluralism the exercise of political power or the rule of law involves some coercion). For Habermas, these first two facts make the constitutional state necessary, so that the democratic process of making laws is governed and constrained by a system of personal, civil and social rights. Following a theme of critical social theory, Habermas introduces a third, and for him more fundamental, social fact concerning the feasibility of democratic constitutional state itself: the fact of social complexity. While the first two social facts require that democracy take a particular institutional and legal form, the fact of complexity is supposed to limit the scope and significance of democratic norms, including such ideals as popular sovereignty and civic participation. What do these "facts" of pluralism and complexity mean for the ideal of a public sphere of free and equal citizens? In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas addresses this question by constructing a two-track model of decision-making within formal institutions whose pool of reasons are shaped by an informal public sphere that now becomes "an anonymous network of communication" dispersed in the media and in the associations of civil society. In this paper, I accept and expand Habermas's general description of the facts of pluralism and complexity and argue that his solution does not identify all the problems faced by the ideal of the public use of reason in complex and pluralistic societies. Habermas fails to give an account of the "wide public reason" that is especially suited for deliberation in such socially, morally and epistemically diverse societies.

Cultural pluralism is not the only form of diversity relevant to the public use of reason in democratically governed, complex societies. Social and functional differentiation also have relevant consequences for democratic deliberation, creating further sources and types of political disagreement to be solved by new forms of public reason. In order to solve these problems of diversity and disagreement, I take as my starting point lines of argument in Habermas's recent work on democracy that go well beyond his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In his earlier work, social differentiation and diversity were always thought to "degenerate" the public sphere. Habermas now is more accommodating of diversity and argues for a more generalized norm of publicity. Rather than a unique product of modern European history, Habermas now thinks that "publicness is a social phenomena just as elementary as actions, actors, associations or collectives." I argue that such a generalized notion of publicity is the first step toward developing a conception of wide public reason appropriate to complex and pluralistic societies. In this paper, I sketch an account of deliberative politics guided by wide public reason in such contexts. I show that such an account has resources to solve inevitable disagreements that go beyond the overly Kantian conception of public reason that still underlies Habermas's theory of democracy. I illustrate the superiority of wide public reason over other views by considering several disagreements typical of culturally and social diverse societies, all of which revolve around disputes about standards of public justification. The cases considered here include conflicts surrounding expert authority and norms of justice.