Habermas saw critical internal public spheres supervising organizations as the route out of domination

Evidence

Habermas’s extended presentation of the decay of the bourgeois public sphere concluded with a glimmer of hope. The vastly increased level of productive forces had made available, on the one hand, a quantity of social wealth and, on the other hand, a potential for destruction which were so great that structural conflicts of interest over them ought, in his view, to lose their edge. Against this background, what needed to be done was to discover whether there were organizations containing functioning internal critical public spheres which would be able to supervise other organizations in which such critical public spheres were absent. According to Habermas, `whether the exercise of domination and power persists as a negative constant, as it were, of historyor whether, as a historical category itself, it is open to substantive change’ would depend on the increase or decrease in the extent of this supervision of bureaucratic decision-making by critical publicity released through public spheres within organizations themselves. (The variation on this hope for the 1980s was: it depended on whether subcultures that were critical of growth were able to form autonomous public spheres through grassroots organizations, and on whether they were able to practise a considered combination of power and self-restriction, whether the state and the economy, using power and money as their methods of control, could be made more sensitive to the results of radical democratic opinion-formation directed towards specific purposes and relevant to the life-world, and whether the emphasis could be shifted towards controls effected on the basis of solidarity. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2377

Categorization

• XREF: The 1980s ‘subcultures critical of growth’ variant prefigures later work on civil society and radical democracy (Cohen, Arato). — connects to: Habermas conceived revolution as gradual repoliticization of a dried-up public sphere — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2656