1

AUTHOR: MICHAEL WELTON TITLE: Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning theory SOURCE: Studies in the Education of Adults v33 no1 p20-34 Ap 2001 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. ABSTRACT This article argues that Jrgen Habermass commitment to a deliberative form of democracy, the foundational importance of the lifeworld for healthy human existence, and civil society as the pre-eminent learning domain can help the global adult education movement to understand its potentialities and limitations in a rapidly changing world. The article explicates Habermass recent articulation of civil society and the public sphere in Between Facts and Norms. We turn to Habermas to learn more about civil society in order to construct an adequate theoretical framework towards the achievement of a learning society that encourages active citizenship, nurtures people-centred work and fosters public spaces that engage a significant minority of citizens in deliberative processes committed to the common weal.
INTRODUCTION

Jrgen Habermas has been one of the most influential western social theorists of our post-war world. His ideas have sparked controversies and debates throughout numerous disciplines from accounting to adult education and resonated with the new forms of political action and thinking in our post-communist and post-Marxist world. In our disenchanted times, Habermas has persisted, almost defiantly, to articulate a view of democracy that challenges both the cynicism of contemporary political theorising and the idealism of the communitarians. From his epochal The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (first published in 1962), only recently translated into English, through the Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) to the recent Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996) Habermas has pursued his quest for a viable democratic practice in our post-traditional global reality at a rather complex level of abstraction. In his personal comportment and engagement with his own agonising German reality, Habermas has embodied the spirit of engagement, openness and humility lacking in so much of our public talk and action these days (Habermas, 1997). However, his theoretical work written in the high culture tradition of serious German scholarship has not been particularly accessible to those citizens who are struggling to make sense of the massive transformations occurring in our global age. Although Habermas writes out of the European experience, his thinking about civil society and the public sphere offers helpful ways of thinking about these matters in a global context. The language of civil society is now widely used by thinkers and activists from China to the Middle East. The concept of civil society has gained an immense popularity in the past few decades. It appears to be a concept of great promise, even hope, for many foes of our market-driven age in all parts of the world, from Jamaica to Lebanon. In this article, I will argue that Habermass commitment to a deliberative form of democracy, the foundational importance of the lifeworld for healthy human existence, and civil society as the pre-eminent learning domain can help the global adult education movement understand its potentialities and limitations in a rapidly changing world. In particular, I will explicate Habermass (1996) recent articulation of civil society and the public sphere in Between Facts and Norms. My main task is to render Habermas intelligible to those engaged in the global struggle for the renewal of democracy. A

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

second no less important task is to encourage adult educators to situate the meaning of their particular projects and practices within the civil society framework. In the twenty-first century, lifelong learning has emerged as the pregnant paradigm for the global era. The design of a just learning society, scarcely begun, requires a social learning theory that can offer necessary conceptual elements for policy makers and practitioners. Work, state and civil society comprise the fundamental domains of lifelong and lifewide learning. We turn to Habermas to learn more about one domain, civil society, in order to construct an adequate theoretical framework towards the achievement of a learning society that encourages active citizenship, nurtures people-centred work and fosters governance and public spaces that engage a significant minority of citizens in deliberative processes committed to the common weal. Between Facts and Norms adds new understanding to how communicative learning processes actually generate influence within civil society.
HABERMAS AND POLITICAL THEORY

Habermas thinks that contemporary political theory has capitulated to a disillusioned and cynical view of politics. It surely is true, Habermas says, that citizens of our late modern world often do have little say in the political deliberative process. The state apparatus is extraordinarily attuned to the way large organisations, like corporations, and their lobbying associations, can influence the implementation process. However, Habermas thinks that contemporary political theory gives away for too much to the administrative system. The normative defeatism (by this he means that political theorists abandon an ideal norm of citizen input) is not simply the result of sobering evidence but of misguided conceptual strategies as well (Habermas, 1996, p 330). Habermas considers two political theories (liberal pluralism and systems theory) that, despite whatever good will might be present in them, do not conceptualise democratic opinion-and-will formation as an integral part of their theory. On the surface, pure liberal pluralist theory seems to allow a role for citizen input. Liberal pluralists assume that politically relevant collective actors enjoy roughly equal opportunities to influence the decision-making processes (ibid, p 331). But this approach eventually collapsed into a theory of elites. Theorists like Joseph SChumpeter essentially reduced the role of democratic process to competing elite leadership teams. Active citizens just vanished into thin air; passive citizens were left to watch the elites decide in their interests. How did the administration actually develop this sufficient sensitivity (ibid, p 332) to the masses? Elite theorists also have to figure out how to understand mounting evidence of citizen unhappiness and distrust of its ruling elites, what Habermas (1975) has called a legitimation crisis. Habermas thinks that systems theory completely abandons any pretence of individual and collective agency (Habermas, 1996, p 334). This misguided conceptual strategy cuts the public of citizens from its lifeworld roots in civil society, political culture, and socialization (ibid, p 335). Any notion of democratic deliberative learning processes is banned from system theorys purview. It does not see the citizen acting, speaking, talking, contending in various communicative spaces within civil society and in system domains (economy or sub-sets of the state apparatus). Communicative power is rendered impotent and the political administrative system is thought of as self-programming and self-referential. This vision of a self-programming administration (broken into various sub-systems in our increasingly complex society) horrifies Habermas. System theorys reification of citizen impotence captures real, historical experiences of ruling class monopoly over decision-making. However, systems theory, like pluralism, runs afoul, fundamentally, in assuming that a highly complex society can be integrated in a system-paternalistic fashion, i.e., in a manner that bypasses the

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

communicative power of citizens (ibid, p 351). The fragmented rich societies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-world provide ample empirical evidence that the autonomous functioning of the political administrative system produces a neglected and powerless underclass disadvantaged in practically every respect (ibid, p 350). Habermas draws several lessons here that are important for critical adult educators. First, without democratic opinion and will formation, expert perspectives on societal organisation will proceed at the citizens expense. Second, it is against the life-historical background of violated interests and threatened identities that the effects of deficient system integration are first experienced as pressing problems (ibid, p 351). System defects do not circulate in the clouds; they reverberate in the bodies and souls of ordinary citizens. Against systems theory, Habermas asserts that he cannot conceive of politics and law as...closed systems (ibid, p 352). Over preoccupation with formal, institutionalised opinion and will-formation forgets the informal contexts of communication found in the public sphere, in civil society, and in spheres of private life (ibid). Systems theory sees only administrative spheres; the communicative power of citizens remains open to the lifeworld (ibid). Habermas simply does not believe that any administrative system can integrate the society. Any paragovernmental bargaining that does not have ties to the parliamentary complex and the public sphere risks serious legitimation problems. If rights are violated (say, the right to compensation for governmentally responsible actions), or groups (like indigenous peoples) feel that their collective identity is threatened, or poor people (like so many single mothers) fall into endemic poverty and suffering, the communicatively generated protest with civil society associations and experience will beat at the gates of the administrative system for action. The systems paradigm, Habermas says, corresponds most closely to the capitalist economy and not the public administration specialized in planning and welfare (ibid, p 353). Nor is it possible to think of family or school as functioning healthily within the logic of administration. Both are communicatively integrated spheres (ibid). We have ample evidence, at this historical moment of the ascendancy of market-logic, of government initiatives to intrude into the schooling domain to skew it towards corporatist purposes. In Ontario, Canadas rich industrial heartland, the right-wing government of Michael Harris attempted in 1998 to by-pass the communicative processes of teachers, parents and students by taking curriculum design out of their minds and hands. This colonisation process precipitated one of Canadas most massive labour demonstrations; a telling illustration, one might claim, of a rebellion from the lifeworld against system intrusion. However, critics of civil societarism may counter: Well, we protested, and it didnt do any good, did it? Administrative systems may use parliamentary protocol to force through policy that does not have widespread public support. However, administrative systems run the risk of precipitating a legitimation crisis, eroding trust and generating pathologies. The lifeworld reproduces itself through the medium of communicative action. Each of its components interpenetrates one another. The action systems specialized for cultural reproduction [school] or socialization [family] or social integration [such as law] are not totally separated in their operation (ibid, p 353). Indeed, the lifeworld forms a kind of network composed of communicative actions (ibid, p 354). There are times when the core area of the political system (administrative complexes, judicial system and parliamentary apparatus) appears to run on its own rails and these rails do not appear to cross into civil society territory. The parliamentary elites interact, in these times, with other elites who people business associations, labour unions and interest groups. These forms of collective bargaining can and do take place apart from the deliberative processes of the citizenry. These latter sorts of elite learning,

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

problem-management and input must be clearly distinguished from supplier groups, associations and organisations that, before parliaments and through the courts, give voice to social problems, make broad demands, articulate public interests or needs, and thus attempt to influence the political process more from normative points of view than from the standpoint of particular interest (ibid, p 355). Supplier groups run the spectrum from groups representing clearly defined group interests to public interest groups with public concerns. These opinion-forming associations, which specialise in issues and contributions and are generally designed to generate public influence, belong to the civil-social infrastructure of a public sphere dominated by the mass media (ibid). Socially responsible adult education responsible to the structural realities and potentialities of our time requires a discourse theory of democracy. This democratic theory implies that binding decisions, to be legitimate, must be steered by communication flows that start at the periphery and pass through the sluices of democratic and constitutional procedures situated at the entrance to the parliamentary complex or the court. . . (ibid, p 356). In normal times (which are becoming, it seems, fewer and fewer), the core areas of the political system proceed in routine fashion. However, in intensely conflictual times, the citizenrys attention-span increases, igniting around the normative aspects of the problems most at issue (ibid, p 357). The uproar in Canada in the spring of 1998 around compensatory payments to those infected with bad blood (Hepatitis C) illustrates well a specific social learning process around a normative issue, viz, the morality of the governments refusal of payment to some victims is severely challenged. The parliamentary system cannot simply proceed instrumentally, or strategically. They are forced into dialogue with civil society, with morally infused communication as civil societys main power source. Large, well-organised interest groups are anchored in the various sub-systems (health, education, environment, religious institutions) of a complex society. The political-administrative system can be affected through the public sphere. For example, a particular Church, say the Roman Catholic Church, drawing from its sacred traditions, when raising questions about the poor, must advertise its interests in a language that can mobilize convincing reasons and shared value orientations (ibid, p 364). Other groups may well join around the Churchs moral critique of levels of poverty in the country. The main function of the political public sphere is that of perceiving and thematising social problems. These crystallised learning processes necessarily develop out of the communication taking place among those who are potentially affected (ibid, p 365). Habermas reminds us that systemic deficiencies (they are multiplying throughout the globe) are experienced in the context of individual life histories. These burdens accumulate and often overload the lifeworld. The lifeworld has the appropriate antennae because in its horizon are intermeshed the private life histories of the clients of functional systems that might be failing in their delivery of services (ibid). Thus, particular forms of action emerge out of the interplay of personal life histories (existential experience) and the communicative struggles within the public sphere. The agonies of the lifeworld are voiced in the public sphere. Habermas observes that specialised languages are available to persons to express their experiences, dilemmas, suffering and longings. The languages of religion, art, music and literature (we can speak of a literary public sphere for instance) serve this purpose: the articulation of values and world-disclosure. The intensity of the struggle of value articulation and world-disclosure at the beginning of the twenty-first century is bitingly intense. Consumerist images and icons have intruded deeply into the value articulating spheres; the corporate-dominated media have crowded alternative ways of seeing and being out to the margins. Bubbling beneath the consumerist overlay seethes enormous unrest

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

and unhappiness. Global high-intensity consumerism generates nihilism, spiritual vacuity, individualism, atomisation, endless addictions and pathologies. Habermas major argument is that the communicative channels of the public sphere are linked to private spheres. Communicative reason, like human freedom, is historys stubborn presence. In his 1978 essay, The power of the powerless, Vaclav Havel applauds a rebelliousness residing in a hidden sphere...where the human predisposition to communication exists (Havel, 1986, pp 57-8). This capacity of rebelliousness is inherent in all human interaction where we seek not power over nor the instrumental use of the other, but simply to understand and express. Rebelliousness, for Havel, appears to be an attribute of social being. Habermas (1996, p 425) counsels us to see the connections between the public sphere (in its often highly visible episodes of communicative and moral struggle) and the thick networks of interaction found in families and circles of friends as well as to the looser contacts with neighbours, work colleagues, acquaintances, and so on and indeed they are linked in such a way that the spatial structure of simple interactions are expanded and abstracted but not destroyed. He thinks that this orientation to reaching understanding, predominant in our everyday practices, is also preserved for a communication among strangers, often conducted over great distances in branches of the public sphere that are quite complex (ibid). In earlier work Habermas (1989) demonstrated well the close connection between private and public. He showed how the clubs and organisational forms of a late eighteenth-century reading public, comprised of bourgeois private (male) persons, were initially manifestations of the private sphere. These literary groups evolved into public social spaces, where themes of larger interest began to be articulated. During this period newspapers flourished as forms of communicative discourse. Here, however, Habermas has been criticised by historians like Robert Darnton for idealising the bourgeois public sphere. Darnton argues that the early print market was viciously competitive (in Garnham, 1992, p 359). Responding to critics, Habermas (1992) accepts this critique without giving away his major argument that we recognise the normative significance of the historical appearance of a liberal bourgeois public sphere. Habermas (1992, p 425) also admits that he did not place enough emphasis on the existence of competing public spheres. Historians have also pointed to the existence of a plebeian public sphere. This convinced Habermas (ibid, p 427) that a plebeian world contained periodic revolts against the hierarchical world of domination.
THE CONCEPT OF CIVIL SOCIETY

Civil society is a very nuanced, contested, multi-layered concept. Habermas maintains that the sphere of civil society has been rediscovered...in wholly new historical constellations (1996, p 366). It cannot be identified with the bourgeois society of the liberal tradition, which Hegel identifies with the market system involving social labour and commodity exchange. Most theorists of civil society argue that the concept no longer includes the economy. Its institutional core is the non-governmental and non-economic connections and voluntary associations that anchor the communication structures of the public sphere in the society component of the lifeworld (ibid, p 367). Habermas (ibid) comments: Civil society is composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations, and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private life sphere, distill and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere. The core of civil society comprises a network of associations that institutionalizes problem-solving discourses on questions of general interest inside the framework of organized public spheres. The discursive designs

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

have an egalitarian, open form or organization that mirrors essential features of the kind of communication around which they crystallize and to which they lend continuity and permanence. These associations, form the organisational basis of the general public of citizens. More or less emerging from the private sphere, this public is made up of citizens who seek acceptable interpretations for their social interests and experiences and who want to have an influence on institutionalized opinion-and-will-formation (ibid). The social structure of civil society is constituted through basic rights. This statement of Habermas provides some indicators for its actual social structure. The classic freedoms of assembly and association, when linked with that of speech, define the scope for various types of association and societies: for voluntary associations that intervene in the formation of public opinion, push topics of general interest, and act as advocates for neglected issues and under represented groups; for groups that are difficult to organize or that pursue cultural, religious, or humanitarian aims; and for ethical communities, religious denominations, and so on (ibid, p 368). The liberal tenets of freedom of the press, radio and television are supposed to preserve an openness for competing opinions and a representative diversity of voices (ibid). Habermas emphasises the way the political system gets intertwined with the public sphere and civil society through general elections. In constitutional democracies, parties have the right to connect with civil society organizations and associations. Ideally, the constitutionally guaranteed protection of privacy allows citizens to be free to express their personalities, believe as they wish, move where they would like to, have their mail not interfered with or their homes invaded. This untouchable zone of personal integrity and independent judgement (ibid) is the sine qua non of a liberal civil society. Dictatorships knock down doors in the night; we ought never to forget some of the horrific images of the twentieth century: soldiers murdering men, women and children in the shanties of South Africa and Latin America, union organisers, grassroots militants, critics of the unfree press disappearing in the night. In the totalitarian societies of bureaucratic socialism (ibid, p 369), the all-seeing state tried to control directly the already bureaucratically desiccated public sphere. People could not believe what they wanted or travel freely; the private basis of this public sphere was intentionally undermined. Habermas comments: Administrative interventions and constant supervision corrode the communicative structure of everyday contacts in families and schools, neighborhoods and local municipalities (ibid). The all-seeing state also destroys living conditions of solidarity. Social groups are crushed, as are associations, and networks. The indoctrination machine goes into overdrive; cultural identities (like, say, Russian Orthodoxy) are assaulted and may dissolve for a time; spontaneous communication is choked as even the coffee shops have their spies lurking in the corners. The more the bonding force of communicative action wanes in private life spheres, and the embers of communication freedom die out, the easier it is for someone who monopolises the public sphere to align the mutually estranged and isolated actors into a mass that can be directed and mobilised in a plebiscitarian manner (ibid). The communication structure of the public sphere, utterly central to a vision of the just learning society, cannot run on its own resources alone. It is only kept intact by an energetic civil society (ibid). Civil society, through its programme, can exercise direct influence on the political system. Actors within civil society are also concerned with revitalizing and enlarging civil society and the public sphere as well as with confirming their own identities and capacities to act (ibid, p 370). This latter observation links well with critical adult educations historic commitment to fostering a political culture in which citizens actively participate in public debate and consciously

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

adopt the discursive attitudes of responsibility, self-discipline, respect, cooperation, and productive struggle necessary to produce consensual agreements (Chambers, 1995, p 177). Adult educators committed to social transformation have laboured innovatively to provide the learning contexts that would enable adults to become masters of their own destiny (Coady, 1939). This often meant starting from square one: courses in public speaking and discussion facilitation. This sort of work, with its nose close to the grassroots, is often invisible to political theorists. It may be invisible; it isnt non-essential. The politics of civil society has two sides: one offensive, the other defensive. Habermas (1996) emphasises the offensive nature of the new social movements more than he did in earlier discussions. They are an integral, if disruptive, part of the civil society infrastructure in late modern societies. In the constitutional democracies, they risk less violent reactions from the state apparatus than in ruthless, dictatorial market-economies (like Indonesia or China). New social movements are not perfect places; they are human, flawed, contentious. However, whatever the political context, the movements task is to bring up issues relevant to the entire society, to define ways of approaching problems, to propose possible solutions, to supply new information, to interpret values differently, to mobilize good reasons and criticize bad ones (Habermas, 1996, p 370). The degree of risk to life and limb for social movement activists hinges on the traditions of civility in particular communities and countries. Anti-apartheid activists finally did undermine the South African regime; at tremendous cost in and out of struggle. The struggle of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people of south-eastern Nigeria over the past decade typifies the high-risk action. The Ogoni peoples actions against Shell Oil accused of polluting and degrading the environment was brutally crushed by the Nigerian military dictator, General Abacha. Saro-Wiwa was hanged with the shocked world looking on, aghast. The repression of citizens actions in civil society can induce despair; it can also serve as a symbol of the irrepressible spirit of resistance in the meanest of circumstances. The human spirit will triumph over tyranny in the end. What other belief is open to us in the face of an old, ruthless world that refuses to leave? The intention of the social movements (those of progressive outlook must grant place to movements that espouse more conservative approaches to civil society, like some religiously motivated critics of state intrusion into their lifeworlds) is three-fold: to produce a broad shift in public opinion; to alter the parameters of organised will-formation; and to exert pressure on parliaments, courts and administrations in favour of specific policies. Movements also act defensively to maintain the existing structure of associations and public influence. My personal experience over the past decade or so in one slice of civil society, viz adult education indicates decisively that neo-conservatism battered our sector very badly, crippling the capacity and sapping the energy to sustain national organisations that could exert pressure on adult learners behalf to the federal and provincial governments. Movements have a second defensive task: they must generate subcultural counter publics and counter institutions. Developing counter forms of media has particular salience in our time. The public sphere, Habermas (1997, p 437) claims, has developed into an arena infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contribution, a battle is fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behaviour while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible. In recent studies of the creation of counter publics through narrowcasting in the small mining town of Buchans, Newfoundland, Elayne Harris (1997a, b), has argued with decided urgency that the lifeworld is tele-visual saturated and demands vigorous

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

counter-media strategies. The defensive aspect of the movements involves preserving and developing the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld...This is the sine qua non for successful efforts to redefine identities, to reinterpret norms, and to develop egalitarian, democratic associational forms...The offensive aspect of collective action targets political and economic society the realms of mediation between civil society and the subsystems of the administrative state and the economy...But the offensive politics of the new movements involve not only struggles for money or political recognition but also a politics of influence targeting political (and perhaps economic) insiders and (self-limiting) projects of institutional reform (Habermas, 1992). Civil society, then, is a fundamental social category that includes a variety of interactions, associations, movements and publics. In this sense, the category is neutral and open for scholarly analysis and discussion on the nature and outcomes of the learning processes within the various spheres within the larger domain. However, conceptual trouble travels fast on the heels of these latter statements. For one thing, the concept of civil society contains both prescriptive and descriptive dimensions. This means that thinkers and activists often use civil society to name something good. Civil society transmutes into a nice sort of place, far away from the nastiness of the economy, the endless manipulations of mendacious politicians and disturbing forms of violence or racism and sexism in daily life. Some feminists have wondered if they even need such a concept. Phillips (1999, p 56) says a feminist looks around the world and sees much the same patterns repeating themselves in every sphere of existence. Social philosopher Michael Walzer observes, that: Democratic politics requires vigorous associations, but it must cope with the inequalities that arise within the associational world, the frequent divisiveness of communal solidarities, and the fitful and undisciplined character of voluntary work. In the end, though, Phillips (1999, p 56) admits that civil society matters because programs for radical change have to capture peoples hearts and minds and cannot depend on directives issuing from the state. Sharp criticism alerts adult educators to the way sexism or racism can be manifest in civil society organisations and associations, as well as the possibility that a voluntary organisation could engage in disturbingly oppressive practices free from any monitoring attuned to universalist principles. It is my belief, that the various spheres within civil society (from family to publics) are negotiated fundamentally through communicative interaction. In societies that have undergone rationalisation, tradition-bound practices (in family and household, for example) come under scrutiny from reason. Taken-for-granted patriarchal practices (such as men speak, women are silent in some Indian contexts) are called into question by appeal to universal norms (the freedom of speech). Once called into question, patriarchal power can attempt to maintain itself through violence. These practices that prevent some human beings from developing their full potential cannot survive over the long haul once the door has been opened revealing their degrading nature. Here we are simply alluding to a salient fact: civil society is both a sociological category and something for which to struggle. In many countries of the world, civil society has not yet emerged, either from the bonds of traditional society or from the shackles of state dominance. In many other countries (like those in central Africa), society itself is in such a shameful mess that one is hard pressed to find civility, let alone civil society. In the western liberal democracies, where civil society has emerged as a relatively autonomous sphere, the threat to its continued stability comes from an ascendant economy that is commodifying everything, from spirituality to the wilderness. In the USA, even pieces of civil society appear to be on the trading block. Some critics of Habermas believe that this civil societarian understanding of deliberative democracy forgets political economy; that Habermas has slid down the

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

slippery slope to liberalism. Those critics of civil society who have been intellectually suckled by Marxism are often sceptical of the civil society renaissance down to the marrow of their bones. Marx wrote about civil society in his early critical engagement with Hegel. He thought that capitalism had eroded all forms of human interaction, leaving us all as mere monads facing off against each other. The economy ruled, and until it was socialised, all talk about civil society was futile. This latter statement, while simplified, is still widely shared by many leftists. Even Antonio Gramsci, celebrated as more flexible than Marx, argued for an autonomous civil society only as part of a strategy of seizing power. Once in power, the subaltern classes would have little need of an open civil society. Thus, Marxist critics of civil society essentially argue that its advocates forget political economy. Adult educators, might recognise the terror and power of the global economy, ruled by its mighty transnational corporations. Several things seem clear. First, we recognise that some adult educators work within the system realm of the economy. Usually they end up doing the corporations bidding. This is simply because the system realm is not governed by the logic of communicative interaction, though minimal space is sometimes available for communicative action. Its goal is to maximise profits and the learning processes are oriented to doing so efficiently. Questions pertaining to the democratisation of work are raised largely outside the economys logic, percolating within the lifeworld. Second, it is not a question of setting civil society against the economy (or state) as it is a matter of locating the critical resources and collective capacity to actually challenge the economic structures of domination. The Marxist critics of civil society fall back on a largely rhetorical position, parading outmoded notions of revolution at the point of production. No matter that this revolution has never occurred. In our spiritually and morally post-communist world, we must gamble on lifeworld resources and the communicative power of a dynamic, intellectually alert citizenry. The logic of political economy is not the only logic at work in our world. In fact, the socialist humanist movements of by-gone years actually worked to restrain the market not overthrow it, hoping to erect dykes to protect the surrounding social space. Today the dyke has been broken. Evidence of seepage and damage is everywhere. This affirmation of civil society as a critical learning domain does not mean that we should not face up to the realities of uncivil society. On any given day, an ardent civil societarian can sink into despondency. Protestant leader Ian Paisley never changes, never listens, never compromises. Thugs burn down houses; children are killed. Civil wars cross over the boundaries of minimal morality and care for civilians. Nihilistic Burmese soldiers rape and destroy indigenous peoples like the Akha. Israel and Lebanon never seem to make any real headway. Hooliganism runs wild at the World Cup soccer matches. Third world shantytowns reel from murder to murder. It never seems to end. Thus, the democratic movements emerging from civil society must abandon holistic aspirations to a self-organizing society, aspirations that also undergirded Marxist ideas of socialist revolution (Habermas, 1996, p 372). This is hard news to bear for remnants of the modernist left. Civil society can directly transform only itself, and it is not a kind of macro subject that could bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it (ibid). Nor is administrative power a suitable medium for fostering emancipated forms of life (ibid). However, ii is important to affirm and understand the power civil society does have. Most important, it can mobilise counter knowledge and draw on its own experts to make the pertinent translations of issues that administrative power may try to control.
BARRIERS AND POWER STRUCTURES INSIDE THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Habermas (ibid, p 373) wants to defend the claim that under certain circumstances civil society can acquire influence in the public sphere, have an effect on the

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

10

parliamentary complex (and the courts) through its own public opinion, and compel the political system to switch on to the official circulation of power. The literature on the sociology of mass communication conveys the sceptical impression that western democracies are power-ridden, mass-media dominated public sphere (ibid). What Habermas is willing to admit here is that the groupings of civil society are indeed sensitive to problems, but the signals they send out and the impulses they give are generally too weak to initiate learning processes or relevant decision making in the political system in the short run (ibid). Civil society, in a word, requires an awakened and mobilised public sphere. Never one to resist complexities, Habermas takes us on a tour of actually existing public spheres. First, in late modern societies, the public sphere is substantively differentiated. The public sphere is made up of various publics. Habermas writes of popular science and literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist and alternative publics and publics concerned with health-care issues, social welfare or environmental policy. Second, we can differentiate publics in terms of the density of communication, organizational complexity and the spatial range. Habermas distinguishes three different types of public within his second category. Episodic publics occur, it seems, almost by chance encounter in taverns, coffee houses, at social gatherings, on the streets: O, yeah, I didnt know that so and so government agency was going to lay off 50 workers... Small awakenings occur in episodic encounters: they can braid into something larger, more sustained. Occasional publics happen, for example, in theatres, at rock concerts, church congresses and endless associational gatherings, such as conferences. There is a definite ritualistic quality to many occasional gatherings. But they may allow for sustained communicative action and reflection. Abstract public spheres are composed of isolated readers, listeners and viewers scattered across large geographic areas (the so-called mass media). All these partial publics, remain porous to one another (ibid, p 374). Habermas (ibid) believes that hermeneutical bridges can be built between publics, one text to the next as he puts it. To be sure, exclusion mechanisms operate in segmented public spheres. However, publics cannot harden into systems. Habermas speaks of the universal public sphere. It is made up of all the segmented publics; however, the boundaries inside the universal public sphere...remain permeable in principle (ibid, p 374). Why? The liberal public sphere requires unrestricted inclusion and equality. Labour and feminism, for instance, were able to join these discourses in order to shatter the structures that had initially constituted them as the other of a bourgeois public sphere (ibid). The feminist discourses on civil society, however, are less sanguine about womens participation in civil society than Habermas appears to be. Some actors are more firmly anchored in civil society than others. Some persons, given their backgrounds, easily identify with political parties, pressure groups or unions. Other actors must actively produce identifying features (ibid, p 376). This is especially evident with social movements, which must pass through two phases: self-identification and self-legitimation. Even after that, an identity politics must be pursued and these learning processes run parallel to goal-directed politics. They must continually reassure themselves of their identity. It is also shown in the actors willingness to go beyond an interest in self-defence and take a universalistic stand against the open or concealed exclusion of minorities or marginal groups. The very existence of social movements, one might add, depends on whether they find organizational forms that produce solidarities and publics, forms that allow them to fully utilize and radicalize existing communication rights structures as they pursue social goals.

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

11

A third group of actors journalists, publicity agents and the press collect information, make decisions about selection and presentation of programs and to a certain extent control the entry of topics, contributions, and authors into the mass media-dominated public sphere. These selection processes become the source of a new sort of power. Many communications theorists have decried the way private firms with large advertising outlays (ibid) have dominated the selection processes. In liberal constitutional democracies, legal forms and institutional structures determine whether political parties and public interest groups have influence over programming. Global critical adult education confronts the harsh reality that those actors operating outside the political system or outside large organizations normally have fewer opportunities to influence the content and views presented by the media (ibid, p 377). within a civil society frame there appears to be an asymmetrical relationship between the information-processing strategies of the media (media experts, programme directors, the press) and the public. Habermas thinks that the publics cognitive capacity to shape the mass media is an unusually scarce resource (ibid). This is largely because reporting facts as human-interest stories, mixing information with entertainment, arranging material episodically, and breaking down complex relationships into small fragments all of this comes together to form a syndrome that works to depoliticize public communication (ibid). The best thinkers within cultural studies (Hall, 1980) have argued that viewers are not simply passive receptacles for corporate-driven image-makers. Viewers employ strategies of interpretation that work received images, or messages, within particular lifeworld contexts. As viewers, we are quite capable of rejecting what we see and hear. This seems to be small comfort somehow. Civil societarians need a normative frame to guide global struggles against corporate control and domination of image and information processing. Habermas writes approvingly of Gurevitch and Blumers (1990) summation of the tasks the media ought to fulfil in democratic political systems. 1. surveillance of the sociopolitical environment, reporting developments likely to impinge, positively or negatively, on the welfare of citizens; 2. meaningful agenda-setting, identifying the key issues of the day, including the forces that have formed and may resolve them; 3. platforms for an intelligible and illuminating advocacy by politicians and spokespersons of other causes and interest groups; 4. dialogue across a diverse range of views, as well as between power-holders (actual and prospective) and mass publics; 5. mechanisms for holding officials to account for how they have exercised power; 6. incentives for citizens to learn, choose, and become involved, rather than merely to follow and kibitz over the political process; 7. a principled resistance to the efforts of forces outside the media to subvert their independence, integrity and ability to serve the audience; 8. a sense of respect for the audience member, as potentially concerned and able to make sense of his or her political environment (Gurevitch and Blumer, in Habermas, 1996, p 378). Habermas (ibid) concludes: In agreement with the concept of deliberative politics, these principles express a simple idea: the mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatory of an enlightened public whose willingness to learn and capacity for criticism they at once presuppose, demand, and reinforce; like the judiciary, they ought to preserve their independence from political and social pressure; they ought to be receptive. The sociology of mass communication depicts the public sphere as infiltrated by administrative and social power and dominated by the mass media. If one places

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

12

this image, diffuse though it may be, alongside the above normative expectations, then one will be rather cautious in estimating the chances of civil society having an influence on the political system. The central question for civil societarian adult educators and citizens is simply this: who can place issues on the agenda and determine what direction the lines of communication take? Drawing on the work of Cobb et al (1976), Habermas identifies three potential sources of agenda building. First, there are those who have inside access. Here the initiative comes from office holders or political leaders. They are attuned to issues circulating inside the political system. The broader public is either excluded from the process or does not have any influence on outcomes. Second, the issue may begin inside the political system. But proponents of the issue must mobilise the public sphere because they need the support of certain groups, either to obtain formal consideration or to implement an adopted program successfully (Habermas, 1996 p 380). Finally, the initiative lies with forces at the periphery who must drive issue through complex communicative processes within civil society and public spheres towards the parliamentary gates. Habermas however, reminds us again, as long as in the public sphere the mass media prefer, contrary to their normative self-understanding, to draw their material from powerful, well-organized information producers and as long as they prefer media strategies than lower rather than raise the discursive level of public communication, issues will tend to start in, and be managed from, the center, rather than follow a spontaneous course originating in the periphery. Garnham (1992, p 372) worries that in an age when market forces are global in scope, a new international public sphere must be constructed. He thinks that democratic accountability can be integrated with media systems of matching scale. . . (ibid, p 371). Within Habermass scenario, social movements can play an active role particularly in perceived crisis situations, a surprisingly active and momentous role. In these times, actors get the opportunity to reverse normal circuits of communication (Habermas, 1996, p 381). In fact, the communication structures of the public sphere are linked with the private life spheres in a way that gives civil-social periphery, in contrast to the political center, the advantage of greater sensitivity in detecting and identifying new problem situations (ibid). Consider the following topics: the risks involved in peaceful uses of atomic energy or genetic engineering, ecological threats involving an overstrained natural environment; the dramatically skyrocketing impoverishment of the Third World, problems of world economic order; feminisms plethora of themes, increasing immigration; and the associated problems of multiculturalism. Habermas (ibid) observes Hardly any of these topics were initially brought up by exponents of the state apparatus, large organizations, or functional systems. Instead, they were broached by intellectuals, concerned citizens, radical professionals, self-proclaimed advocates. These issues or topics start in the outmost periphery of society. They force their way into newspapers, they are taken up by associations, clubs, professional associations. They find forums, citizen initiatives before they catalyze the growth of social movements and new sub-cultures. In turn, the latter dramatize contributions, presenting them so effectively that the mass media take up the matter. Only through their controversial presentation in the media do such topics reach the larger public and subsequently gain a place on the public. Movements often have to get the attention of the public and the media through sensational actions, mass protests and unceasing campaigning. They need this support, before an issue can make its way via the surprising election of marginal candidates or radical parties . . . (ibid). Actors come together, they formulate the relevant issues, they promote them in the public sphere. At the very least, one can say that insofar as a rationalized lifeworld

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

13

supports the development of a liberal public sphere by furnishing it with a solid foundation in civil society, the authority of a position-taking public is strengthened in the course of escalating public controversies (ibid, p 382). Informal public communication prevents the accumulation of indoctrinated masses. It also can bond the scattered potentials of a public that was only abstractly held together through the public media, and it helps this public have a political influence on institutionalized opinion-and-will-formation (ibid). For Habermas, subinstitutional politics requires a liberal public sphere. But when people cannot get a hearing for their oppositional arguments, one available option is civil disobedience. Within the deliberative democratic perspective, acts of civil disobedience appeal to officeholders and parliamentary representatives to reopen formally concluded political deliberations so that their decisions may possibly be revised in view of the continuing public criticism (ibid, p 383). Acts of civil disobedience are the cry to connect organized political will-formation with the communicative processes of the public sphere (ibid). Thus, in Habermass estimation, civil disobedience thereby refers to its own origins in civil society that in crisis situations actualizes the normative contents of constitutional democracy in the medium of public opinion and summons it against the systemic inertia of institutional politics (ibid). Habermas deserves great credit for challenging simplistic notions of constitutional democracy. From my perspective, we need to understand the role that constitutional democracy plays in sustaining a vital civil society and awakened publics. He draws our attention to four points for elaborating a historically situated understanding of the constitution (ibid, p 385). In conclusion, Habermass recent reflections on civil society and the public sphere are richly suggestive for adult learning theorists and practising adult educators who are designing intervention strategies for a just and honest learning society. For one thing, Habermas challenges the global adult education community to speak circumspectly and purposively about its specific roles in the three domains of state, work and civil society. The language of education for social transformation is of little help; it is too imprecise and smacks of the old Marxian dream of total change. Now we can speak in more self-limiting and precise ways about the asymmetrical relationship between the system (state and work) and the lifeworld (civil society). This means fundamentally that civil society is the privileged communicative learning domain. It is here that critical adult education must stake out its turf. This leads to a second conclusion. With others, critical adult educators can foster communicative infrastructures within existing institutions, associations and public spheres. This means that the rules of discourse must be followed: no one may be excluded; anything may be said, questioned, or challenged; and no force may be used (Chambers, 1996, p 197). A vital civil society requires a political culture in which citizens actively participate in public debate (ibid, p 177). support where they already exist) innovative learning forms where adults can practise what Amy Gutman and Denis Thompson (1990, p 100) call a distinctly democratic kind of character the character of individuals who are morally committed, self-reflective in their commitments, discerning of the difference between respectable and merely tolerable differences of opinion, and open to the possibility of changing their mind . . .. Designing a just learning society calls, minimally, for a differentiated view of learning domains, a clear philosophic sense of the vital commitments within these domains and an astute understanding of how influence is channelled from the lifeworld to the system domains. Without this precise knowledge, education for social transformation remains a high-sounding, but empty phrase.
ADDED MATERIAL

MICHAEL WELTON

MICHAEL WELTON:

Civil Society and the public sphere: Habermass recent learning

14

Mount St Vincent University, Canada

REFERENCES

Chambers, C (1995). Feminist discourse/practical discourse, in Mehan, J (ed), Feminists Read Habermas, New York: Routledge. Chambers, C (1996). Reasonable Democracy: Jrgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coady, M (1939). Masters of Their Own Destiny, New York: Harper and Row. Cobb, R, Ross, J K and Ross, M H (1976). Agenda building as a comparative political process, American Political Science Review, vol 70, no 1, pp 126-38. Garnham, N (1992). The media and the public sphere, in Calhoun, C (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gurevitch, M and Blumer, G (1990). Political communication systems and democratic values, in Lichtenberg, J (ed), Democracy and the Mass Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gutman, A and Thompson, D (1990). Moral conflict and political consensus, Ethics 101, October, pp 64-88. Habermas, J (1975). Legitimation Crisis, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J (1984 and 1987). The Theory of Communicative Action. Vols. I and II, Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J (1992). Further reflections on the public sphere, in Calhoun, C (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J (1996). Between Fact and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J (1997). A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, The University of Nebraska Press. Hall, S (1980). Encoding and decoding TV-discourse, in Hall, S (ed), Culture, Media, Language, London: Routledge. Harris, E (1997a). From broadcasting to narrowcasting: Television as a language for possibility for community development, International Journal for Lifelong Education, vol 16, no 1, pp 54-72. Harris, E (1997b). Not essential to teaching and research: the Buchans community learning process, The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, vol 11, no 1, pp 1-26. Havel, V (1986). The power of the powerless, in Havel, V, Living in Truth, London: Faber and Faber. Phillips, A (1999). Who needs civil society? A feminist perspective, Dissent, pp 56-61. Walzer, M (1999). Rescuing civil society, Dissent, pp 62-7.