Policy discourse and public spheres: the Habermas paradox

Abstract

Emerging attention to policy discourse and network models of governance render dubious Jürgen Habermas' claim that discourses do not govern. His position follows from a sharp delineation between civil society and the state and from a conceptual strategy, centering on a bifurcation of lifeworld and system, that tends to deflect attention from multiple, complex ways in which discourses connect public spheres with the policy process. Given his substantial influence on the emergence of critical policy studies, Habermas thus presents a paradox. Although his work has served to advance the critique of technocracy, his conceptual strategy tends to reinforce technocratic self-images in a way that would inhibit a move from monologue to dialogue in policy discourse. The potential for such a move suggests that the question to ask is not whether discourses govern, but which discourses are to be involved in governing.

Keywords:

• Habermas
• public spheres
• policy discourse
• governance

Notes

1. For Weber (1978, Vol. 1, p. 85), the rationality of this organizational type was not simply instrumental, but also ‘formal’ in the sense of being ‘expressed in numerical, calculable terms’.

2. For example, organizational jokes – when they target the style and vocabulary of the official idiom – reveal implicit understandings that inform the concrete practices of organization members and, indeed, indicate ambivalence in regard to the prevailing discourse. Although it may well substantially shape administrative activities and expectations, this discourse can simultaneously be recognized as ridiculous. The adventures of the cartoon character Dilbert provide a case in point (Adams 2000, e.g. pp. 41, 101)

3. The narrative structure of policy process models was anticipated in 1910 by John Dewey in How We Think (1985, ch. 6), in which he relied upon student accounts of problem solving processes to delineate a set of functional elements. This text influenced number of key figures in the development of the policy field. On the sharply differing responses to Dewey advanced in this regard by Harold D. Lasswell, Herbert A. Simon, and Charles E. Lindblom, see Torgerson (1995, pp. 235–243).

4. The liberal conception of government, which Habermas has come to replicate in his own way, was explicitly designed to restrict such access. Indeed, the very distinction between state and civil society is part of a design that, by ostensibly enforcing separation, lends credence to the distinction. The state is supposed to serve on behalf of the public interest as a detached, neutral arbiter of competing social interests. The separation was emphatic in John Stuart Mill's classic 1861 formulation, Considerations on Representative Government (1958). Although Mill strongly advocated vigorous, even unorthodox public discussion, the proper business of government was to reside elsewhere. A deliberative representative body, ultimately responsible to the populace, was to provide ‘will’, but this body was to be distinct and separate from an appointed commission for legislation that was to offer ‘intelligence’ (p. 79). Central to the state, moreover, was to be an administration ‘organized under command’, the only form of organization suited ‘for action in the proper sense’ (p. 71); and there was to be no ‘meddling’ in ‘the actual functioning of governing’, which was solely ‘the business of administration’ (p. 85). Challenging idealized liberal designs, the concept of the administrative sphere as the principal locus of policy discourse draws attention to actual power relationships that otherwise are prone to be neglected. The concept does not deny legal and operational discontinuities between the administrative organizations of the state and those, most significantly, of the great capitalist corporations, but does emphasize continuities that typically are denied in liberal presuppositions. To speak of multiple points of access for public discourse to influence policy discourse is to indicate both emerging practices and a potential challenge to the administrative sphere as it has historically been constituted (cf. Torgerson 1990). At the same time, a focus on the administrative sphere should not diminish the significance of those avenues of access to the policy process – e.g. via elected officials or the courts – that liberal democratic constitutions formally provide and that can prove important in practice.

5. On the question of discourse and agency in this regard, see Torgerson (2007), which compares Habermas and Foucault while addressing limitations of both.