JEFF NOONAN

MODERNIZATION, RIGHTS, AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY:THE LIMITS OF HABERMAS’S DEMOCRATIC THEORY

ABSTRACT. Jurgen Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the norma-

tive foundations of democracy assumes the formal separation of democratic politicalpractice from the economic system. Democratic autonomy presupposes a vital publicsphere protected by a complex schedule of individual rights. These rights are sup-posed to secure the formal and material conditions for democratic freedom. How-

ever, because Habermas argues that the economy must be left to function accordingto endogenous market dynamics, he accepts as a condition of democracy (the formalseparation of spheres) a social structure that is in fact anti-democratic. The value of

self-determination that Habermas’s theory of democracy presupposes is contradictedby the actual operations of capitalist markets. Further democratic developmentdemands that the steering mechanisms of the capitalist market be challenged by self-

organizing civic movements.

KEY WORDS: capitalist market, democracy, Habermas, public sphere, rights, self-

determination, self-organizing

Viewed from the perspective of democracy and individual freedom,social modernization is contradictory. By ‘modernization’ I meanthe formal rationalization of major social institutions and practices.Formal rationality is two-sided, comprising both the quantitativeevaluation of practices in abstraction from the content of the endsthose practices serve, and the subordination of social power to lawsthat are in principle open to public questioning and contestation.Over the long term modernization served to free major institutionsfrom the service of substantive normative aims and arbitrary politi-cal power. This development had the effect of breaking down meta-physical conceptions of society as a moral hierarchy modelled onhierarchies in nature, and thus also the belief that those humanswho occupy prestigious social positions are morally superior tothose who occupy menial positions. In so doing, the process of so-cial modernization freed citizens from ‘unthinking acceptance of

Res Publica (2005) 11:101�123 � Springer 2005DOI 10.1007/s11158-005-1478-3

ancient custom’.1 It was thus the matrix within which ideas ofequality and individuality central to liberal democratic traditionsdeveloped.

On the other hand, however, these same ideas of equality andindividuality were interpreted within a radically changed socio-economic context. With the dissolution of socially effective substan-tive norms, economic production became unhinged from beliefsabout the moral limitations of private accumulation. Locke, forexample, argues that once money has been introduced into eco-nomic relations the natural laws that limit accumulation (‘‘take nomore than you can use’’, ‘‘leave enough and as good for others’’)are suspended, and economic agents are free to amass as muchwealth as they can, regardless of its impacts on the life-horizons ofothers.2 Thus the individual who found him or herself withoutaccess to necessary resources confronted a contradiction. While theincipient ideas of equality and individuality established a spacewithin which a free life could be led, the evolving capitalist econ-omy created a new form of material dependence on economicdynamics that were judged rational not relative to whether theysatisfied fundamental needs for all citizens, but according to howrapidly they allowed capital to grow.

This contradiction � between the growth of formal politicalfreedom, and expanding material dependence on market dynamicsgoverned by the primary goal of their own growth � largely struc-tures the historical development of Western liberal democracy.Society has become democratic as a result of struggles that fo-cussed both on expanding popular participation in political institu-tions, and on freeing market forces from any obligations to meetthe fundamental needs of citizens � i.e., from having to satisfy thematerial conditions of individual freedom and political democracy.This contradiction can be understood as a clash of opposed valuesystems; one oriented by the growth of monetary value regardlessof its consequences on the life-horizons of the majority of citizens,and the other oriented by the value of subordinating social institu-tions, resources, and practice to the growth of the capacities ofhuman being through which freedom is expressed.

1 M. Weber, The Theory of Economic and Social Organization (New York: Free

Press, 1964), p. 123.2 J. Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980),

pp. 20�1, 23�4.

102 JEFF NOONAN

I cannot trace the historical development of that contradictionhere. Instead I want to examine how it operates in the political the-ory of perhaps the most important contemporary theorist of thelink between modernization and democracy, Jurgen Habermas. Onthe one hand, Habermas sees in the process of social modernizationthe creation of the formal conditions for democratic politics andindividual freedom. The retreat of substantive norms and thegrowth of formally rational law gradually produced new demandson political authority. In order to be legitimate, the laws passed bypolitical authorities increasingly had to be defensible to citizens asthe laws that they would prescribe to themselves as rational individ-uals. On the other hand, however, Habermas judges the economyto be a zone of ‘norm free sociality’.3 He means that the economyis not a system of normative value but rather a system that issteered by the goal of efficient production, without having to an-swer to central authorities who would judge it according to someextra-economic goal (satisfying the gods, building socialism, etc).

While Habermas is clear that the steering mechanism of theeconomy must be prevented from ‘colonizing’ other spheres of soci-ety (the family, education, political practice) he does not see inthose steering mechanisms an essentially anti-democratic value sys-tem. While the colonization of the lifeworld by the economy canhave undemocratic effects, this is not due to the content of the va-lue system served by the economy, according to Habermas. Rather,as noted above, he regards the economic system as norm free. As aresult, I will argue, his political theory preserves, rather than re-solves, the contradiction at the heart of liberal-democracy. Thatcontradiction is that formally free political practices serving the endof individual freedom exist within an economic system that tendsto undermine the satisfaction of the material conditions of thatfreedom and the practices through which it is realized.

MODERNIZATION, PLURALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

According to Habermas, traditional societies purchased their soli-darity at the cost of the free self-determination of their members.Under pressure from the forces of modernization, the closed

3 J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2 (Boston: BeaconPress, 1987), p. 171.

103THE LIMITS OF HABERMAS’S DEMOCRATIC THEORY

horizons of the traditional lifeworld were forcibly opened up tonew experiences, foreign identities, and distant societies. As Haber-mas argues, ‘growing pluralism loosens ascriptive ties to family,locality, social background, and tradition. ... With each newimpulse towards modernization, intersubjectively shared lifeworldsopen’.4 In the paradigm case of Europe the end result has been,according to Habermas, the reconsolidation of lifeworlds on awider basis of collective identity and a deeper understanding ofindividuality.5

As lifeworlds increasingly come to encompass former strangers,new modes of social integration must develop. In particular,communicative reason becomes more and more important. Asautomatic agreement upon norms becomes less likely the morepluralistic a society becomes, the more important it is for citizen-strangers to be able to agree on frameworks in which they canresolve their normative conflicts peacefully. As Habermas argues,‘the further the structural components of the lifeworld and theprocesses that contribute to maintaining them get differentiated,the more interaction contexts come under the conditions of mutualunderstanding, that is, consensus formation that rests on theauthority of the better argument’.6 The rational formation of con-sensus applies to both types of norms that Habermas identifies,moral and legal.7 Both types of norms are valid, Habermas main-tains, if they satisfy the discourse principle of legitimacy. He definesthis principle as follows: ‘Just those action norms are valid towhich all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in arational discourse’.8 Habermas’s understanding of democratic poli-tics is thus a discourse-theoretic version of the more general idea ofdeliberative democracy. The regulating idea of this understandingof democracy is that citizens’ preferences are not fixed, but are

4 J. Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2001), pp. 82�3.

5 Ibid., pp. 83�4.6 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2, p. 145.7 The distinction between moral and legal norms is not central to this exami-

nation. For discussion and criticism of Habermas’s distinction see R. A. Lynch,‘‘Distinguishing Between Legal and Moral Norms: A Central Problem in BetweenFacts and Norms’’, Philosophy Today: Supplement (1997), pp. 67�72.

8 J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995),

p. 107. See also his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, (CambridgeMA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 62�8.

104 JEFF NOONAN

open to revision in light of counter-argument. The best or most ra-tional public policies develop out of deliberative debate between allwho will be affected by them.9

In the case of the legitimacy of political norms, the deliberativeinterpretation of the discourse principle entails that only thosenorms are valid that could meet with the assent of all affected citi-zens after a full and free debate concerning the laws they will obey.In Habermas’s words, a political norm is valid if it could ‘meetwith the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislationthat has in turn been legally constituted’.10 In any legitimate lawthe communicative power of citizens is translated into the adminis-trative power of enforceable legal rules. But citizens of a modernsociety, who treat themselves as rational, are not obliged to obeyjust any administrative decision, but only those that rest uponnorms that are in principle rationally legitimate. The discourseprinciple thus explains, according to Habermas, ‘the practice ofself-determination on the part of legal consociates who recognizeone another as free and equal members of an association they havejoined voluntarily’.11 Habermas argues that self-determination isessentially a political practice made possible by the formal separa-tion of social spheres, law as a rational system of framing publicrules, and the mutual regard citizens have towards one another asmembers of a legitimately constituted society. However, as I willdemonstrate below, he argues against extending this same principleof democratic legitimacy into the major institutions of the capitalisteconomy.

9 The present paper cannot delve into a complete analysis of deliberative

democracy as such. For fuller accounts see D. Thompson and A. Guttman,Democracy and Disagreement, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); J.Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy, (CambridgeMA: MIT Press, 1996); J. Bohman and W. Rehg, Deliberative Democracy (Cam-

bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); R. Goodin, Reflective Democracy, (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003). For criticisms of deliberative democracy see O. Weinberger,‘Habermas on Democracy and Justice: Limits of A Sound Conception’, Ratio Juris

7/1 (1994), pp. 239�53 ; J. Femia, ‘Complexity and Deliberative Democracy’, Inquiry39 (1996), pp. 359�97; C. Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, (London: Verso, 2000);I. M. Young, ‘Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy’, Political Theory 29/5

(2001), pp. 671�90; J. O’Neill, ‘The Rhetoric of Deliberation: Some problems inKantian Theories of Deliberative Democracy’, Res Publica 8/3 (2002), pp. 249�68.

10 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 110.11 Ibid.

105THE LIMITS OF HABERMAS’S DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Thus the essential democratic practice for Habermas is reasoneddebate between citizens. In contrast to Rawls’s monological testingprocedure for political norms, Habermas argues that actual dialoguebetween citizens is necessary in a democratic state.12 Thus, the key tothe existence of a democratic state is a vital political public sphere.The political public sphere he defines as ‘all those conditions of com-munication under which there come into being a discursive formationof will on the part of a public comprised of citizens of a state’.13 By‘discursive formation of will’ he means that citizens form their politi-cal demands in response to the give-and-take of reasons typical ofrational argument, as opposed to merely voting on their pre-reflectivepreferences. The key to the existence of a deliberative democraticprocedure for the testing of political norms is thus the political publicsphere, and the key to the existence of a political public sphere, is alegal structure of rights marking it off from both the administrativesystem and the economy.

THE DIALECTIC OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE AUTONOMY

Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of democracy is asynthesis of the two classic sources of democratic theory, liberalismand republicanism. From liberalism Habermas draws the idea ofthe individual as an autonomous agent, and from republicanism hedraws the idea of popular sovereignty as the essence of democracy.Historically, these two conceptions have been opposed. Habermas’sdiscourse theory draws out the unseen unity that connects them:

Discourse theory takes elements from both sides and interprets them in a conceptof an ideal procedure for decision-making. Democratic procedure, which estab-lishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of

12 While an important subject, we cannot enter here into a discussion of thesimilarities and differences between the work of Rawls and Habermas. See J. Hab-ermas, The Inclusion of the Other, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 49�105; J.Bohman, Public Deliberation, pp. 14�16, 79�89; K. Baynes, The Normative Groundof Social Criticism: Kant, Rawls, Habermas, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), T.McCarthy, ‘Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in

Dialogue’, Ethics 105 (1994), 44�67; T. McCarthy, ‘Practical Discourse and theRelations Between Modernity and Politics’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 4(1995), 461�81; S. Benhabib, ‘Deliberative rationality and Models of Democratic

Legitimacy’, Constellations 1/1 (1994), 26�51.13 J. Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in ed. Craig Calhoun,

Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 446.

106 JEFF NOONAN

self-understanding and justice, grounds the perception that reasonable and fair re-

sults are obtained inso far as the flow of information and its proper handling havenot been obstructed.14

The deliberative procedure characteristic of democracy restsupon certain normative presuppositions that are ‘tacitly presup-posed when we participate in these democratic and constitutionalpractices’.15 Most importantly, participants in democratic practicespresuppose that as citizens all participants are free and equal,autonomous beings. Unlike classical liberalism, however, Habermasdoes not understand private autonomy as a natural property ofhuman beings. Nor does he assume, with classical republican theo-ries of democracy, that private autonomy is a pure function of theconstitution understood as the expression of the will of the people.Instead, Habermas understands private and public autonomy asdialectically linked.

Liberalism has historically prioritised private over public auton-omy while republicanism has historically asserted the reverse, sub-ordinating private autonomy to public. Habermas’s theory revealswhy they must be thought together in a democratic state. A demo-cratic state is regarded by its citizens as a voluntary association. Inso far as members of the political association see other members asfellow citizens, they presuppose that their fellows are free andequal. The freedom and equality of citizens, however, is neither anatural property of human being (liberalism) nor a pure construc-tion of particular constitutions (republicanism). Rather, it is theresult of the mutual recognition citizens must accord each other iftheir association is to be free. Recognizing each other as free andequal consociates entails a commitment to rational argument con-cerning the implications of the laws that all will be required toobey. Without autonomous citizens the law cannot be free, butwithout free laws citizens cannot be autonomous. ‘The co-original-ity of private and public autonomy,’ Habermas writes, ‘first revealsitself when we decipher, in discourse-theoretic terms, the model ofself-legislation according to which the addresees of the law aresimultaneously the authors of their rights’.16 That is, autonomouscitizens are only obliged to obey those laws that they regard

14 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 296.15 M. Carlheden and R. Gabriels, ‘An Interview With Jurgen Habermas’, The-

ory, Culture, Society, 13/3 (1996), p. 2.16 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 104.

107THE LIMITS OF HABERMAS’S DEMOCRATIC THEORY

themselves as having authored. In other words, only those lawsthat are consistent with the rights of citizenship are legitimate, be-cause only those laws could meet with the assent of all citizens in arational dialogue. Hence the legitimacy of the law depends uponthe existence of the rights of citizenship. What, then, is the originof these rights?

Once again Habermas rejects one-sided accounts of the origin ofrights. Rights are neither natural possessions of individual humansnor gifts bestowed by a republican constitution. While the histori-cal origin of liberal rights is found in the drive of the Europeanbourgeoisie to consolidate its control over the economic system,17

their conceptual content cannot be reduced to this historical func-tion. To be properly understood, rights must be seen as followingfrom a relation between people who regard each other as free andequal citizens:

At a conceptual level rights do not immediately refer to atomistic and estrangedindividuals who are possessively set against one another. On the contrary, as ele-ments of a legal order, they presuppose collaboration amongst subjects who recog-

nize one another, in their reciprocally related rights and duties, as free and equalcitizens.18

In other words, rights are functions of a certain mode of inter-subjective relation. They would have no purchase unless peoplewho think of themselves as citizens regarded one another as freeand equal. Rights institutionalise this mode of intersubjective rela-tion.

A vital democracy must satisfy five classes of rights, accordingto Habermas. The first class follows from the equal liberty of citi-zens; the second from their belonging to a voluntary association;the third from their right to legal protection; the fourth from theirright to participate in the political process; and the fifth from thematerial conditions (social, economic, and ecological) of citizen-ship.19 Together these rights define the formal conditions forthe existence of a political public sphere, and the existence of the

17 For Habermas’s account of the historical development of rights, see J. Hab-

ermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge MA: MITPress, 1998), pp. 73�81.

18 Ibid., p. 88.19 Ibid., pp. 122�23.

108 JEFF NOONAN

public sphere in turn defines the formal condition for a vitaldemocracy.

However, a complex schedule of rights and a vital public sphereare necessary but not sufficient conditions of a democracy. In addi-tion to these two conditions a democracy also requires an institu-tional structure that allows for openness, on the part of electedrepresentatives, to inputs that flow in from the political publicsphere. If the formal institutions of government are closed to citi-zen initiatives then the state is not democratic, regardless of howmuch debate it permits. ‘‘Think what you will, but obey’’ as Fred-erick the Great of Prussia said to his subjects, is not a democraticprinciple. However, the form of participation that Habermas insistsupon is essentially informal. That is, he believes democratic legiti-macy demands an open public sphere in which citizens can debateand criticize and generate civic initiatives. Governments mustremain sensitive to these debates, criticisms and initiatives, but theyare not under any formal obligation to be determined in their deci-sions by them. Citizens participate in democratic life by organizingthemselves in the political public sphere, not by directly determin-ing the content of political decisions. As he writes,

[formal political discourses] which, for technical reasons, must be conducted byrepresentatives, must not be conceived along the deputy or proxy model; they sim-

ply form the organized mid-point or focus of the society wide circulation of infor-mal; communication. Discourses conducted by representatives can meet thecondition of equal participation on the part of all members only if they remain

open, porous, sensitive, or receptive, to suggestions, issues and contributions,information, and arguments that flow in from a discursively structured publicsphere.20

To be sure, Habermas believes that participation is essential to ademocratic polity. Still, he stops short of conceiving of democracyas the actual determination of legislation by freely associatedrational citizens. As Cook argues, ‘Habermas severely restricts thecompass of reason when he insists in Between Facts and Norms thatthe communicative power of citizens limit itself to mere influenceover the political system’.21

20 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 182.21 D. Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society (London:

Routledge, 2004), p. 95.

109THE LIMITS OF HABERMAS’S DEMOCRATIC THEORY

To sum up, democratic freedom, in Habermas’s view, is a func-tion of the mutual recognition that citizens of a democratic stateaccord one another. Regarding each other as free and equal, citi-zens accept as legitimate only those political norms that are consis-tent with the rights that follow from their freedom and equality.These rights frame the political public sphere in which citizenscome together to argue about the legitimacy of law. The conclu-sions of these informal discourses are then channelled to the formalinstitutions of political power. It is the responsibility of duly electedrepresentatives to be receptive to these conclusions, and to passonly those laws that are in principle compatible with the freedomand equality of the citizens that the laws will govern. Failing that,laws are mere impositions of power that might be obeyed out offear of the consequences, but can never elicit the respect of the citi-zens, and therefore can never be democratically legitimate.

CAPITALIST MARKETS, COLONIZATION, AND THE MATERIAL

GROUNDS OF DEMOCRACY

While Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the norma-tive foundations of liberal-democracy yields rich insights for theinformal practice of politics in the political public sphere, it acceptsas a condition of democracy the formal separation of politics fromthe economic system. I do not mean to argue that Habermas isagainst the legal and political regulation of the major economicinstitutions. They too must conform to the legal conditions of ademocratic polity. That is, they must respect the rights of citizen-ship in so far as workers remain citizens of a liberal-democraticorder. Nor do I mean to imply that Habermas is content to acceptwhatever distributions which market forces happen to produce.What I do mean to argue is that Habermas forcefully insists thatthe economy of a complex society cannot be directly steered bydemocratic deliberations. By rigidly distinguishing the steeringmechanisms of the political public sphere from the steering mecha-nism of the economy, Habermas blinds his theory to the undemo-cratic value system at the heart of capitalism � his critique of itsinegalitarian distributive effects notwithstanding.

The forthright, indeed, uncritical manner in which Habermasaccepts the liberal-capitalist explanation of the reason why theeconomy must remain free of democratic intervention has drawn

110 JEFF NOONAN

the attention of numerous commentators. William E. Forbath, forexample, argues that Habermas’s understanding of the political andeconomic systems is ‘rigidly dichotomous’ and leads him ‘to bandemocratic processes and participation from aspects of governancethat might engage ordinary citizens in the on-going fashion hismachinery demands’.22 Ricardo Blaug, examining the gradual driftin Habermas’s work towards a reconciliation with liberal argu-ments in favour of an economic system free from democratic inter-ference within its proper range of competence, notes that in hispolitical work Habermas seems ‘more concerned to describe thedangers of too much democratic steering rather than those of aninadequately regulated market’.23 Deborah Cook goes furthest andargues that in his most recent work Habermas, ‘concerned thatactivists might take liberalism’s core of self-empowerment too liter-ally ... offers stern reminders that in the final analysis control overthe economy must ultimately be left to the Invisible Hand’.24 Eachcritic draws attention to the same potential problem runningthrough Habermas’s democratic theory. In this section I want toinquire further into Habermas’s understanding of the material con-ditions of democracy, and explore the tensions that this under-standing introduces into his conception of democracy.

The absence of arguments about the importance of the materialdimension of democracy is no oversight on Habermas’s part. Hisdemocratic theory posits as an essential condition of democracy thefunctional separation of the economic and political spheres which isdefinitive of modernization. He contends that democracy cannotdevelop unless the individual is freed from automatic identificationwith traditional norms, and the individual cannot be so freed with-out the development of the formal rationality of market forces.25

Modernizing dynamics are in large part carried by the growth ofthe capitalist market. As he says, ‘the separation of state and soci-ety also means the differentiation of a market economy institution-

22 W. E. Forbath, ‘Short Circuit: A Critique of Habermas’ Understanding ofLaw, Politics, and Economics’, in eds A. Arato and M. Rosenfeld, Habermas on Lawand Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 273.

23 R. Blaug, Democracy: Real and Ideal, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 152.24 D. Cook, ‘The Talking Cure in Habermas’ Republic’, New Left Review (new

series) 12 (2001), pp. 141�59. See also Cook, Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for aRational Society, pp. 34�5.

25 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, pp. 123�25.

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alized via the principle of individual private rights’.26 While thecomplex schedule of rights that Habermas defends incorporates po-sitive rights to basic resources, and therefore recognises that thereis an economic dimension to citizenship, the right to claim a socialminimum from the state is distinct from the ability to collectivelydetermine economic priorities.27 Habermas explicitly rules out thelatter possibility.

Given this understanding of modernization, Habermas concludesthat no theory of democracy compatible with modern conditionscan do away with the capitalist market as the drive-wheel of theeconomic system. He thus states that ‘discourse theory respects theboundaries between ‘‘state’’ and ‘‘society’’’.28 Even more clearly, inan essay written when the dust was still settling after the collapseof the Berlin Wall, Habermas argues that ‘complex societies cannotreproduce themselves if they do not leave the logic of an economysteered by the market intact’.29 The task of democratic theory to-day cannot, in his view, be to devise new ways through which theeconomy might be directly democratized, but can only be to dis-cover ‘how to make the most effective use of the allocative andinnovative functions of self-regulating markets, while simulta-neously avoiding unequal patterns of distribution’.30 This goal wasonly imperfectly accomplished by the traditional welfare state. Itpurchased ‘factual equality’ at the cost of the autonomy of its cli-ents. The solution will have to involve a creative application of thefifth class of rights to the new challenges posed by a globalisedeconomy.

What those new challenges are, Habermas makes clear in hisimportant essay on globalization. Key amongst them is the threatglobalization poses to the autonomy and sovereignty of thedemocratic nation state, and the implications this loss has for so-cial solidarity. As he argues, ‘globalization shrinks the scope of ac-tion for national government in so far as the sovereign state mustalso open itself externally to international regimes. If this renewedclosure is to come about without socio-pathological side-effects

26 Ibid., p. 63.27 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 123.28 Ibid., p. 299.29 J. Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today?’, in ed. R. Blackburn, After

the Fall (London: Verso, 1991), p. 40.30 Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, p. 49.

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then politics must catch up with globalized markets and has to doso in institutional forms that do not regress below the legitimacyconditions for democratic self-determination’.31 Thus Habermaslooks toward a democratic consolidation of the European Union asthe best immediate hope for internationalizing democracy in re-sponse to the threat globalization poses to national autonomy andsovereignty.32

While Habermas is thus aware that the untrammelled expan-sion of the capitalist market can have negative effects on socialsolidarity, excluding citizens from sharing in material benefits tothe point where they cease to function as citizens, he does notfocus on the undemocratic value system that drives the wholeprocess. Instead, while discussing the need to regulate markets,he is adamant that democratic practices must also be kept fromdirectly infiltrating economy decision making. He argues againstholistic projects of radical democracy that ‘political steeringmechanisms can often take only an indirect approach and must... leave intact the modes of operation internal to functional sys-tems and other highly organized spheres of action. As a result,democratic movements emerging from civil society must give upclaims to a self-organizing society’.33 Holistic projects of radicaldemocracy can be conceived of as any project that insists thatthe major economic institutions must be brought under the dem-ocratic decision making power of associated citizens. Citizens areto be secured in their rights, the economy will be regulated inaccordance with them, but the actual steering mechanisms ofinvestment, production, the nature and content of work, will beleft in the hands of private market agents. A society is demo-cratic, then, for Habermas, not insofar as collective decisionmaking in the interests of securing the material conditions forall-round self-development are secured, but insofar as the lawsthat govern the society as a whole satisfy the conditions of thediscourse-principle of legal legitimacy. As he says, the normative

31 Ibid., 84. See also, D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order, (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1995), 240�41; A. Boron, ‘State Decay and DemocraticDecadence in Latin America’, in eds L. Panitch and C. Leys, Global Capitalism

Versus Democracy: Socialist Register 1999 (London: Merlin Press, 1999), 209�26.32 J. Habermas, ‘Towards a European Political Community’, Society, July/

August 2002, 58�61.33 Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 372.

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value served by his conception of democracy is ‘autonomy, notwell-being’.34

While Habermas’s claim that social complexity is a barrier todemocratic determination of economic priorities and practices mustbe taken seriously, nothing in his argument leads to the conclusion(which he seems to accept) that it poses an insuperable barrier.Social complexity is a fact, not a value, and nothing in Habermas’sargument justifies the conclusion that citizens deliberating togetherare incapable of reducing complexity in the interests of a moredemocratic life. To be valuable, however, such projects would haveto be conceived as multi-generational movements of internal insti-tutional transformation. Habermas is certainly correct to warnagainst attempts to capture the productive powers of society andtransform them overnight. The impossibility of an immediate revo-lutionary transcendence does not, however, rule out the possibilityof long-term transformations. Neither Habermas nor any otherpolitical philosopher is in a position to pronounce with any author-ity on the long-range goals and possibilities of democratic develop-ment. Just as welfare state assurances would have appearedstructurally impossible from the perspective of a nineteenth centuryliberal, so too democratic determination of the economy mightappear impossible today. Time, however, is the mediation betweenutopia and reality: what appears impossible can become realitywhen the necessity of fundamental transformations makes itselffelt.

The necessity of fundamental transformation is making itself felttoday because of the profoundly undemocratic and life-destructivereality of capitalist globalization. Of course, Habermas is not una-ware of the undemocratic effects of the capitalist market. His fa-mous ‘colonization’ thesis maintains that there is an inherent drivewithin the capitalist market to surge beyond politically constitutedlimitations to absorb other fields of social practice that ought to beintegrated through communicative action. He argues that ‘capitalistmodernization follows a pattern such that cognitive-instrumentalrationality surges beyond the bounds of the economy ... into other,communicatively structured areas of life’.35 His solution to thisproblem, however, is not to try to transform the value system

34 Ibid., p. 418.35 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2, p. 304.

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served by the economy (increasing money as the overriding good ofexistence) and thereby institutionalize a democratic economy, butto leave economic systems alone while monitoring their movementsand shoring up social defences against colonizing incursions. Thisview, however, is superficial, because it leaves intact a value systemand social dynamics that determines the content of the humanactivities that take up the major part of the majority of the world’sinhabitants time. Democracy as a political form thus has less andless connection to the experience of the majority of people.

Why? because the majority of people must work for a living. Towork for a living means exiting the public sphere of deliberation, infavour of the purportedly ‘norm free sociality’ of the workplace.But the ‘‘norm free’’ sociality of the workplace is not really normfree at all. It serves a different norm than democratic deliberation,but it is a norm nonetheless. As McMurtry argues, the expansionof the capitalist economy is legitmated by appeal to a conceptionof the ultimate good as ‘to maximize, by any vehicle, method, orchannel open to its entry the ratio of its owners money-demand in-come to money demand inputs’.36 This definition of the good as-sumes that the optimal allocation of resources, natural and social,and the proper goals of human life are whatever the market systemselects.37 This normative drive to equate the good with profitableinvestment is, however, clearly the opposite of the democratic valueof all-round individual development on the basis of economic prac-tices that take need-satisfaction as their priority.

Unless democratic theorists focus on the opposed value systemsof capitalism and democracy it is easy to overlook the lack ofdemocracy in the principles that determine the material activitiesthat in large part determine the quality of our lives. So long as thelegal conditions for democratic deliberation are secured, it appearsthat democracy is safeguarded, because free determination of thecontent of our life-activity is not included at the heart of the con-ception of democracy. The goal for Habermas, remember, is auton-omy, and not well-being. Yet how can democracy be adequatelyconceived if it does not base itself on a conception of well-being asfree life-activity? How can democracy, which Habermas himselfassociates with self-determination, be compatible with social

36 J. McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, (London: Pluto, 1999), p. 127.37 J. McMurtry, Value Wars, (London: Pluto), 2002, p. 135.

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conditions in which workers are working longer, for less or stag-nant pay, in less secure conditions?38 How can democracy be com-patible with conditions in which the young of even the mostadvanced societies face bleak prospects of finding meaningful, se-cure employment?39 If the ‘self’ refers to the whole human being,the being that deliberates and works, self-determination cannot besecured without democratic interventions into the value-system atthe heart of the economy.

The consequences of failing to demand that the economic systembe subordinated to the same value-system that underlies democracyfor workers are only partially revealed in statistics about the stateof labour markets. It is also necessary to examine what workersthemselves have to say about their experiences of liberal-capitalistreality. Consider for example these words of a Canadian steelworker, describing the consequences of his job for his home life:‘You don’t know if tomorrow you are going to have a job. ... Youdon’t know if your family is all of a sudden going to pack up andleave you because they are fed up with it. You know my kids willcome home and I’ll come home after like 12 hours of fighting andarguing with guys down there ... and a kid looks at you and goes‘‘Dad’’. You go nuts on him, eh. And you think, ‘Christ, if I don’tget out of here I’m going to kill someone.’40 What is interestingabout this example is that the worker identifies the demands on histime and the interactions in the workplace as the cause of problemsoutside the workplace. In other words, it is not quantifiableinequality that prevents him from human interactions with his fam-ily, but the quality of life in the workplace. Such a problem cannotbe addressed through the constitutional protection of a social mini-mum, however important that is, but only through more funda-mental changes to the types of social relationships that typifycapitalist workplaces. One cannot keep the value system of the cap-italist economy out of other spheres of life, as this man’s testimony

38 L. Mishel, J. Bernstein, and J. Schmitt, The State of Working America

1998�99, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 119�21.39 E. Fussel, ‘Youth in Aging Societies’, in eds J. T. Mortimer and R. W. Larson,

The Changing Adolescent Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), pp. 18�51.

40 W. Secombe, ‘Contradictions of Shareholder Capitalism’, in eds L. Panitch

and C. Leys, Global Capitalism versus Democracy: Socialist Register 1999 (London:Merlin Press, 1999), p. 99.

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shows, because it is the same human being that works, goes home,deliberates and votes. To argue that one must nevertheless do so isto shield the structural cause of these pathologies, and the power-lessness that they attest to, from being addressed.

The goal of transforming the inner logic of the capitalist econ-omy must, however, be distinguished from authoritarian centralplanning. A democratic economy is distinct from both a capitalisteconomy and a centrally organized command economy. It is dis-tinct from both in so far as the directing force of a democraticeconomy is the goal of actively satisfying the defining needs of citi-zens, a goal which is subordinated to the goal of profit maximiza-tion in capitalism and the security of the ruling party in acommand economy. As McMurtry argues, ‘Production and distri-bution for life need, and that, in turn, for life capacity and experi-ence in more comprehensive enjoyment and expression � this is theonly ultimate value on earth. Any sane economy is there to serve itin opening horizons of life worth’.41 The problem that those con-cerned with advancing that goal face however is not providing anabstract moral defence of this value, but with specifying how ex-actly it can be realized. There seems no focussed large-scale move-ment consciously pursuing this goal. If that is the case, itsrealisation is perhaps nothing more than utopian speculation.

The last decade has, however, witnessed massive protests againstthe capitalist form of globalization. The international movementagainst the growing international institutionalization of the rightsof corporations has spurred the hopes of socialists that this move-ment can be transformed into a positive force of socialist transfor-mation.42 The future accomplishments of anti-capitalist networksremain to be seen, but at present they seem to fall victim to theobjection that they lack a coherent positive programme and a con-sistent theory of how radical institutional change can be accom-plished. Pulling out hundreds of thousands of people to ademonstration is no doubt impressive, but if the protesters simplyreturn to their homes and ordinary ways of life then they do notultimately advance the democratic values in whose name they dem-onstrate. While I agree that it is important to organize politically

41 McMurtry, Value Wars, p. 124.42 I cannot provide an adequate political analysis of that complex movement

here. See D. McNally, Another World is Possible (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Press,2002); A. Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

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and to demonstrate against the on-going deprivations that theglobalization of capitalist dynamics imposes or reinforces, I think itis most important for radical democratic critics of the currentworld order to start the work of value-transformation now, inwhatever institution that they happen to operate within. If the life-grounded alternative to the capitalist market is ever going tobecome a global reality, theorists and activists alike must be able toprove that it is possible. Its possibility can only be proven by mak-ing it an actuality, and this can initially be accomplished on a smalland local scale. Nevertheless, the examples that I will providebelow have the advantage over systematic programmes of sweepingtransformation that they are real. Interpreted with an eye to the fu-ture, these small incursions of a democratic steering logic into eco-nomic dynamics offer the hope that democratic alternatives tounfettered market forces can be realized through a strategy of pieceby piece re-conquest of major socio-economic institutions and prac-tices.

The first example concerns the forces that produce and distrib-ute housing. The production and distribution of housing in NorthAmerica according to the logic of real estate markets has led to asocial disaster of homelessness in every major American and Cana-dian city. Since housing is a necessity it follows that access to itwould be covered by Habermas’s fifth class of rights. However,having a right to housing tells us nothing about the type of hous-ing to which one is entitled, or about how the right is to be actua-lised. The welfare state solution to this crisis has historically beento build alienating public housing complexes that are aestheticallysoul-destroying and socially ghettoizing. It is not clear, however,that the quality of public housing could be said to violate anyone’sright to housing (assuming the existence of such a right). Yet, fromthe standpoint of a conception of democracy that privileges a con-ception of active citizenship, the quality and means of accessinghousing cannot be ignored. If democracy, in its political dimension,means active citizenship, then the more citizens are active the moredemocratic the society is. Recently, in Toronto, this principle ofactive citizenship was instantiated in the struggle for affordablehousing.

A community group working with one of the most marginalizedsectors of society, homeless former psychiatric patients, found itselfwith surplus office space. Rather than renting it at market rates or

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converting it to high-end condominiums, the Parkdale Area Recre-ation Centre decided to convert it to affordable housing for its cli-ents. The clients helped with the renovations, drew up a set ofcriteria for housing applicants, as well as a constitution to governthe collective living space. In the process the clients became politi-cally engaged, learning more about the social causes of homeless-ness, as well as active in the process of satisfying their own needs.By any measure the process was politically enabling, but it requiredprecisely the sort of democratic intervention into the logic of themarket that Habermas argues against. Far from undermining theefficiency of the market, however, the PARC project exposedthe inefficiency of both the capitalist real estate market and thetop-down bureaucratic projects of the traditional welfare state. In-stead, the problem was addressed using local energies and self-organizing, political mechanisms. This small project did not solvethe housing crisis in Toronto, but it does point towards a newdemocratic strategy for addressing it, one that relies upon the self-activity of local communities rather than the unfettered capitalistmarket or bureaucratic welfare administrations.43 Multiplied hun-dreds of times over in different cities the example of PARC wouldcreate not only a powerful democratic counterweight to real estatemarkets, but also projects in democratic community living thatcould serve as a living alternative to the atomistic, commodified cul-ture that rules at present.

My second example is a challenge to the self-regulating logic ofthe capitalist market in the organization of the workplace itself. Inresponse to the severe social crisis provoked by IMF mandated‘structural adjustment’ in Argentina in 2001, unemployed workersseized their factories and began to run them as cooperatives. Themovement of the unemployed synthesised political and economicpower in neighbourhood-based democratic assemblies that assertedpopular control over productive resources abandoned by theformer owners because they were no longer profitable in thechaotic conditions provoked by the IMF. One local organizer ofthe Moviemiento de Trabajdores Desocupados describes their workas follows:

43 My thanks to Victor Willis, director of PARC, for speaking to me about theproject.

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The neighbourhood has its proper form of organization. The assemblies occur

weekly. From these assemblies there are groups of companions who are elected,but all are on rotation. So they are no permanent, and it is in accordance withresponsibility and commitment, and this is in the area of social bonds and with

input from the rest of the neighbourhood ... We want to protect our space so thatnever will liberty be restrained ... this transformation has to do with commitmentto participation ... no one is going to give you a free ride; you are the one that is

going to obtain things, fighting alongside your companions.44

These local cooperatives have remained viable for over 3 yearsnow, threatened not by the complexities of society but only by for-mer owners trying to retake their property. Again, what this exam-ple shows is the possibility of internal transformation through thesocialization and democratization of resources that already exist. Itis not a new world in embryo exactly, but a concrete instance ofpossibilities for democratic social organization that could, over thelong-term, become the material basis for a democratic society.

CONCLUSION

It might be said that, as examples of a radically different demo-cratic future, the examples just mentioned seem to fall victim to theobjection that though they were accomplished within a capitalistsociety, they did not at all threaten its functioning. Thought offrom the perspective of the principle that underlies them, ratherthan from the perspective of what they accomplish as isolated pro-jects, however, their implications are different. What they revealfrom this perspective is that the democratic freedom that citizensenjoy can be used as a space from which the undemocratic dynam-ics of the economy can be challenged. That is, using Habermas’sunderstanding of political democracy as an organizing basis, small-scale self-organizing democratic movements can develop and seekto extend those principles into the socio-economic sphere. Since theprojects are small in scale they initially fly below the radar of theappropriating class and its repressive instruments and also do notcreate the widespread economic upheaval that can be used to dis-credit movements for immediate social transformation. The key totheir becoming an alternative model for production and distribu-tion on a society-wide scale depends upon the people who organize

44 D. Khorasanee, ‘The Movement of the Unemployed in Solano’, New Socialist45 (2004), 14�5.

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them understanding the radical difference of principle that under-lies them and consciously seeking to link up with other projects ofthe same type. This strategy is clearly gradualist and its successcannot be theoretically guaranteed, nor its future shape plotted outin advance of concrete local deliberations and actions. The organiz-ing idea behind it is to insidiously build up an alternative institu-tional structure, steered by a life-grounded value system thatexploits the openness of political democracy in order eventually toproduce a radically transformed socio-economic system.

Habermas’s alternative � political regulation of the economyrather than normative transformation of its steering mechanisms �suffers from the limitation that it does not focus on changing thequality of the practices that define economic life. If Habermasaccepts that the capitalist market must be free to operate in its ownproper sphere, he thereby accepts the determination of the materialconditions of life by democratically unaccountable forces andagents. If he accepts the material determination of life horizons bydemocratically unaccountable forces, then he seems forced by thelogic of his position to accept undemocratic social relations as thematerial foundation of the social whole in contradiction to his affir-mation of democratic values. Habermas attempts to evade the forceof the contradiction by arguing that democracy today can be real-ized only within the political sphere. However, he relies upon thevalue of self-determination in his explanation of democracy, andthus commits himself to a value that cannot be confined to someone sphere of social existence. Thus, he cannot escape the force ofthe contradiction at the heart of his conception of democracy.

Democratic self-determination entails more than participation ininformal discourses concerning the legitimacy of the law. Humanbeings are integrally active across social spheres. That is, humanrationality is expressed in the development of life-projects that re-quire not only political participation, not only a formal right topassive need satisfaction and ecological protection, but the collec-tive determination of common, substantive values that regulate thegovernance, production, and use of natural and social resources. If,as in the case of a capitalist global market economy, natural andsocial resources are left under the control of endogenous marketdynamics and the minority of people who benefit from them,then the material basis of self-determination, and the material ele-ment in the rationality of life-projects, necessarily falls outside of

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democratic governance. That is to say, citizens of such a society arenot in reality self-determining. No being can be self-determiningwhose time, access to resources, and mode and conditions of work,is determined by forces that do not take any account of the welfareof that being.

If we view democracy from the perspective of the majority ofpeople who must work for a living, then we can see that even thecomplex schedule of rights that Habermas develops is an insuffi-cient guarantee of democracy. They are insufficient because, asEllen Wood argues, rights in a capitalist democracy are ‘de-valued’.They are devalued because they presuppose private control overlife-resources and are therefore incapable of fundamentally alteringthe material dependence that most people experience. Legal equal-ity, even of a rich and complex form, is not the answer becauselegal privilege is not the problem:

The essence of modern ‘democracy’ is not so much that it has abolished privilege,or, alternatively, that it has extended traditional privileges to the multitude, butrather that it has borrowed a concept of freedom designed for a world where priv-

ilege was the relevant category and applied it to a world where privilege is not theproblem. In a world where juridical or political status is not the primary determi-nant of our life chances, where our activities and experiences lie largely outside the

realm of our legal or political identities, freedom defined in these terms leaves toomuch out of account.45

Habermas’ rights-based approach to democratic freedom leavestoo much out of account because it leaves the real ‘determinants ofour life chances’ � ‘our working lives, the allocation of labour andresources, the organization of time itself’’46 � under the control offorces that he himself admits have no intrinsic interest in the well-being or freedom of the people it controls. In such conditions,where citizens are not only de facto under the control of undemo-cratic forces but also told that it is necessary for their democraticstruggles to stop short of challenging that control, democracyretreats to a political form structurally incapable of re-setting thepriorities of social life in ways conducive to concrete freedom.Democratic socio-economic priorities must be encoded in the

45 E. M. Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1995), p. 235.46 E. M. Wood, ‘Democracy and Capitalism: Friends or Foes?’, New Socialist 1/1

(1996), p. 14.

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constitutional principles that define the polity as a whole, but in or-der to become effective they must also shape the practices anddynamics that drive the socio-economic system. How far thedemocracy can be democratized is a problem that only creative andimaginative projects can answer, but these projects cannot even be-gin if we start from the premise that the internal dynamics of theeconomy are not the proper subject of democratization.

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Windsor401 Sunset,Windsor,Ontario N9B 3P4CanadaE-mail: jnoonan@uwindsor.ca

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