The public sphere and contemporary lifeworld: reconstruction in the context of systemic crises

Abstract

For the Habermasian theory of the “public sphere” to make sense in the 2020s, it must be able to address the modern tendency toward global systemic crises. To examine the relevance of the Habermasian public sphere to today’s deeply interconnected digital world, this article provides a selective reading of Habermas’ writings on the public sphere, examining how he developed the concept from its conceptual core (1962) through his Legitimation Crisis (LC; 1973) and The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA; vol. 1 [1981] 1984, vol. 2 [1981] 1987). Working from the perspective of the “differentiated lifeworld,” we show here that the theory’s background assumptions about reality (truth), solidarity (justice), personality (authenticity) are now being exposed and destabilized by current crisis tendencies and imaginaries. Here, we examine three exemplary (and interconnected) global disruptions that expose these assumptions: the climate crisis, the intensification of financial inequality in the Global North, and the rapid push toward datafication. Through our examination of whether the public sphere as Habermas conceived of it can exist in today’s world, we provide a more expansive form of criticism of the public sphere (which is usually critiqued on the narrow grounds of the rational bias of communicative rationality). Here, we underscore the fundamental importance of addressing the complex system-lifeworld dynamics that are today re-conceptualizing and re-contextualizing the “public sphere” in this era of contemporary global crises.

Introduction

What we now call a “public sphere”—public assemblies deliberating on common problems and a common fate—has long existed in human history (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, pp. 301ff; Keane, 2009). It was first formalized into a representative political structure (an assembly reflecting a collective will) in the Greek polis (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021, pp. 301ff, 346ff; Keane, 2010, p. 935ff), and the modern concept of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) appeared in the late 18th century in the West (see e.g., Splichal, 2022). The contemporary notion of the public sphere emerged in the work of Jürgen Habermas. While Habermas’ work has sparked many rounds of critique and gone through many reformulations, it remains the key reference point for theories about public communication and its connections to media and democracy, and about the relationship between citizen debate and political power.

The concept of the public sphere has never been a stable one, even in Habermas’ own work. We begin here by tracing the evolution of the concept in order to answer this question: how might the concept of the public sphere be reconstructed to apply to our globalized contemporary world? In a world that is so communicatively, politically, and economically intertwined, all crises feel like global crises, and global crises are no longer temporary emergencies but the new normal—a kind of permanent state of crisis.

Habermas’ original formulation of Öffentlichkeit, which has been rendered (in English) as simply “the public,” “the public sphere” or “publicity” (which itself contains both the connotation of publicness and its more standard connotation of publicizing or making public), was first introduced in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS; [1962] 1989). This master term operates on several different levels. At the most fundamental level, the term invokes the distinction between the public and the private “intimate sphere”—a distinction that emerged in the 19th century within the bourgeois family. As Habermas notes, the new subjectivity, “the innermost core of the private,” is not fully private but “always already oriented toward an audience (Publikum) (STPS, p. 49): both bourgeois men and women gathered in new public spaces, but for different purposes. Bourgeois men gathered in public houses, cafes, and table societies to engage in new forms of deliberative discussion about topics both economic (e.g., debates over the state and the market) and political (the emergent series of bourgeois rights claimed against the still-mercantile state), while bourgeois women congregated in public cultural spaces (the salon, literary circles), fostering cultural marketplaces for literature and art and linking newly formed subjectivities to both those cultural spaces and the artifacts that they revolved around. Eventually, says Habermas, this network of cultural and deliberative public spaces merged, forming a political public sphere, which forms new claims and presses them through parties and parliaments.

In STPS, Habermas traces this concept back to its historical roots, moving from the feudal system’s space of “representative publicity” (the public display of the king and noble) to the early modern bourgeois public sphere just discussed and then to the later 19th century, when, he argues, the public sphere was “refeudalized” by emerging monopoly capitalism that was even then beginning to be dominated by mass culture. Broadly, then, the notion of the public encompasses the emergence of a modern self that engages in deliberative discussion about both the cultural products of the modern literary and artistic market and the political processes of representation. This deliberation leads to critical debates that form a larger space of public representation, the political public sphere. Discussion of the public sphere is complex because it can touch on any of these concepts and on the relations between them.

In the field of communication, the legacy of this concept is especially complicated, because Habermas’s publications about the “public sphere” coincide with a historically unique period: in the latter half of the 20th century, professional mass media institutions dominated the national communication landscape of Western democracies. Media scholars have long examined this media sphere (its contents, sourcing practices, framing conventions, etc.) through the lens of the public sphere.¹ Our aim in this article is to contribute to this debate by proposing a specific, contemporary interpretation of the public sphere—one that is rooted in the longer trajectory of Habermas’s work. Specifically, we argue here that the multiple analytical layers related to the concept of the public sphere, which were first sketched out in STPS (privacy/publicity, processes of deliberative talk, the cultural and political public spheres), were developed and unpacked in Habermas’ other major mid-period sociological works. While he rarely invoked the specific concept and rubric of the public sphere in these works, we argue that he developed and integrated key elements of the public sphere concept in his Legitimation Crisis (LC; 1975) and Theory of Communicative Action (TCA; Habermas, vol. 1 [1981] 1984, vol. 2 [1981] 1987). As we show here, a contemporary configuration of the notions of the public and the lifeworld must be situated in the conjuncture of 21st century material and systemic disruptions that democracies face.

Our argument proceeds in three stages. First, we situate Habermas’ concept of the public sphere in the context of system-lifeworld interaction and systemic, disruptive transformations. We do this by connecting his initial theorization of the public sphere (STPS, [1962] 1989) to LC (1975) and TCA (Habermas, [1981] 1984, [1981] 1987). Our reading posits that communicative action is the necessary coordination mechanism between the lifeworld and the systems of the larger world, which produces “external” disturbances that enable lifeworld actors to see beyond the horizon of taken-for-granted assumptions that shape their subjectivity.²

Second, we examine the contemporary, systemic disruptions or transformations that call into question people’s background assumptions about the material world (reality), social order (solidarity), and authenticity and self (personality), the three domains of Habermas’s analytical model of the modern lifeworld’s differentiated rationalities. The disruptions that we analyze are: the intensification of inequality, which is creating public debates which raise claims about society, solidarity and questions of rights and rightness; the contemporary phenomenon of datafication, which destabilizes assumptions about privacy, authenticity, and opinion (personality, self-knowledge, honesty) while simultaneously undermining the legitimation of political power; and climate change, which raises the specter of a fundamentally destabilized material world, thereby calling into question existing forms of knowledge (realism) and even our ability to argue about the truth of the objective world. Of course, these contemporary global transformations are deeply entangled, but for the sake of analytical clarity, we discuss these three contemporary systemic disruptions/transformations separately, using each as an exemplary case to highlight the aspects of the current crisis in each domain of differentiated lifeworld rationality.

In Habermas’s usage, crisis is a circular and iterative concept: crises in the political or economic system may lead to crises of integration or motivation; or they may move in the other direction, growing in a series of feedback loops. However, in order to work through this complex argument in reasonably systematic form, we adopt a specific usage for some key terminology. We refer to systemic challenges, changes and trends (inequality, datafication, climate) as global transformations, problems or disruptions, highlighting that they are material, large scale processes that pose complex problems and needs for adaptation to social systems and institutions, particularly in democratic societies. We reserve the use word crisis to primarily refer to the way these disruptions and transformations destabilize and challenge the inherited background assumptions that form the base of collective lifeworld reasoning. Such destabilization calls into question our inherited stock of knowledge about reality, and opens previously stable cultural background assumptions to broad social questioning and criticism. This, we argue creates a sense of crisis in the action horizons of lifeworld. Our division of terminology here (disruptions for systems, crisis for lifeworlds) is a technical and analytical one.

Of course, in any society—but particularly in democratic societies where a reasonably functioning public sphere is a key element—the crisis of the background assumptions of lifeworlds also leads toward systemic crises (e.g., the lifeworld crisis of actions horizons and motivation lead to legitimation crisis) and vice versa. It is precisely this relationship that we are attempting to reintroduce to the contemporary discussion of the public sphere.³

We conclude by developing urgent lessons, reflections and further theoretical questions that emerge from the intersection of the Habermasian model of the public sphere with the material processes that cause the current systemic disruptions. We examine a preliminary set of theoretical and political questions that emerge from the fact that the historical model of the public sphere is anchored in lifeworld assumptions that are being disrupted and destabilized by the contemporary zeitgeist of global perpetual crisis.

Public sphere, lifeworld and systemic crisis: a neglected theoretical thread

The concept of the public sphere has undergone continuous development—and faced continuous criticism—since Habermas published the original German version, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, in 1962. By the time the book was translated into English as STPS ([1962] 1989), Habermas had been continuously developing the key elements of his work for several decades. While the Anglo-American reception took some of these factors into account (see the seminal Calhoun, 1993), the reception of the original English translation of STPS was curiously ahistorical; in communication research, its concepts were often operationalized in ways that were quite distanced from the social–historical matrix of the 1950s in which they were developed.

Although STPS described only the first iteration of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, it became in the English-speaking world the dominant frame through which the concept was understood. Habermas’s subsequent refinements of the theory (1996, 2022) have been largely ignored in communication.⁴ We therefore focus on this somewhat neglected middle period, following a thread of argument from STPS through LC ([1973] 1975) and into TCA ([1981] 1984, [1981] 1987).

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Habermas’ original intervention, STPS ([1962] 1989), is a normative analysis of the idea (or category) of the “public sphere,” a social imaginary that emerged in the early modern period as something outside of the power of the state, the economy and the private sphere (cf. Taylor, 2003). In STPS, Habermas first establishes his conceptual framework and traces the emergence of the early modern public sphere, then turns to a narrative of that public sphere’s decline (Verfallgeschichte) under the pressure of mass media, advertising, and (to a lesser degree) consumption in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The normative framework of STPS consisted of both social–institutional conditions and structures and what Habermas would later call formal-pragmatic conditions for public communication. The latter were anchored in the structure of what he would call in LC the emerging modern lifeworld: the public is the body of private persons come together to discuss affairs of common concern and potential common interest.⁵ This original model of STPS conceptualizes the public sphere as a relational concept; it is the interface between powerful material, systemic social forces (articulated through the state and the market) and the conditions and capacities with which people make sense of these forces and consent to or resist them. Habermas’s early account thus foreshadows his theory of the lifeworld, with its constitutive tension between historically and socially defined limits on the one hand and its capacity for intersubjective rationalization on the other. It is this conceptualization of the public sphere as relational that we see as useful in our contemporary moment.

Legitimation Crisis

LC ([1973] 1975), written 11 years after STPS, was Habermas’s first major statement on the (then) contemporary social system of advanced or late capitalism (Spätkapitalismus), which held in the West from the end of World War II to approximately 1975. By the early 1970s, a combination of external shocks (the oil crisis) and internal contradictions (fiscal crisis of the state [O’Connor, 1973]) was destabilizing this postwar model; Habermas’ 1970s analysis pointed to this unraveling of the post-war order at the very beginning of what would later be called a period of neo-liberalism. Like STPS, LC was grounded in both a historical and normative analysis, but it centered on an analysis of then present crisis tendencies; as Habermas showed, these crises were being displaced onto the state, which then displaced them into the social and cultural spheres, producing problems of social integration that in turn led to a cycle of delegitimation.

Habermas pointed to a new type of legitimation process that responded to this new milieu: it elicited generalized and diffuse motives of mass loyalty but avoided actual participation, favoring engagement that was democratic in form but encouraged behavioral passivity. This tendency, which he characterized as the “civic privatism of the public sphere,” encouraged political abstinence, orienting itself instead toward career, leisure, and consumption. This was the overarching social characteristic of the lifeworld in the liberal post-war regime and was required for the legitimation of that lifeworld. It promoted the pursuit of acceptable rewards of money, leisure time and security—a family orientation toward consumption and leisure; and at the same time, it disseminated “achievement ideology” in the educational system, promoting career orientations toward status competition (LC, pp. 36–37, pp. 75–76).

These changes systematically eroded the late capitalist commitment to tradition, both economic and cultural/religious, that had underpinned the “socially effective cultural value systems” (p. 76) necessary for reproduction. Religion had been softened and dissolved in the course of capitalist development (Weber’s disenchantment); the service sector expanded, bringing more social interaction under the commodity form; areas of social and cultural intercourse were increasingly being regulated by the state; culture was commercialized; and even child-rearing was systematized by psychologization (a process analogous to Foucault’s normalization). These changes transformed the subjectivity of citizens. Worldviews no longer oriented everyday action in the lifeworld; practical questions no longer addressed truth or norms; values had become irrational. This unmooring from tradition dovetailed with the hyper-competitive career achievement ideology (the direct ancestor of today’s “branding” of the self and hustle culture). In an increasingly regulated labor market, the system was unable to produce adequate rewards, creating a motivation crisis and producing new forms of class stratification based on education.

In sum, LC identified the differentiated systemic structures and described how they affected the lifeworld. Importantly, it also linked its analysis of the lifeworld crisis with the experience of social actors. Crisis, Habermas says, is an objective force with normative meaning for actors: “(…) only subjects can be involved in crisis. Thus, only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises (…)” (LC, 3). Theorizing the interconnection between system, lifeworld, and crisis, then, became the theoretical task of the TCA—an even more intensely relational conceptualization of the public sphere and its relationship to global transformations which underpins the revised notion of the public sphere that we posit here.

Theory of Communicative Action

The systems theoretical framework in LC drew from the work of Parsons, but its critique of neo-Marxist crisis theory transformed Parsons’ descriptive model into a critical model. In TCA, Habermas systematically developed the crucial elements of system, lifeworld, and crises of reproduction which, we argue, formed a matrix for a revised concept of the public sphere.

In TCA, the social and systemic framework of communicative action is developed through three major themes: (1) the system–lifeworld distinction; (2) three fundamentally differentiated components of the lifeworld; and (3) the definition of communicative action itself.

First, Habermas makes a fundamental distinction between system and lifeworld. He separates systems (the economic and political systems, which function via “steering media”—money and power, respectively) from the lifeworld, which he presents as a context-forming horizon of meaning whose medium is (natural) language. Critically, for Habermas, it is this separation that produces the differentiation within capitalist modernity itself. The modern economy and state, each with their own emergent logics, separate from the traditional logics that governed them (here, Habermas’ account parallels Weber’s ([1920] 2013) analysis of instrumental rationality, or Zweckrationalität). The lifeworld separates from the traditional, religious worldviews that anchored it. As these separate-but-parallel processes occur, social systems (which govern the lifeworld) integrate with political and economic systems, and the “functionalist logic” of systems of money and power “mediatize” the lifeworld, turning social communication into systems processes and “colonizing the lifeworld” (TCA, [1981] 1987, p. 196, p. 305).

Since the lifeworld is the “background” of all communicative action, this colonization leads to a new type of pathology: individuals’ reasoning capacities are now shaped by their economic roles and consumption, which produces a loss of meaning, anomie, and social dis-integration, particularly a loss of solidarity. (Of course, distortion and ideology existed in other forms and with other consequences in lifeworlds before this late-modern colonization.) Habermas’s critique of this colonization was developed at a particular moment in history, when the administered welfare state was under assault, but neo-liberalism was not yet in full flower. Fraser, for instance, has criticized Habermas’s framework as drawing an overly strong distinction between the spheres of material and symbolic social reproduction (Fraser, 2013). However, the basic idea of the colonization of the lifeworld remains essential to understanding the restructuring of the contemporary public sphere; it anticipates the “deep mediatization” thesis (Couldry & Hepp, 2016) but grounds it in a broader social theoretical framework.

Habermas’s second key theme is the differentiation he posits within the lifeworld itself. He argues that the lifeworld is now differentiated into three components, each of which provides essential social resources. These three components are culture, society, and personality. Culture is the “the stock of knowledge” that grounds the interpretations that participants use as they come to an understanding about “something in the world”; it is the coordinating source of meaning, and is not subjective but intersubjective. Society denotes “the legitimate orders” which regulate membership, which in turn secure solidarity. By personality Habermas means “the competencies that make a subject capable of speaking and acting,” which underpin processes of reaching understanding and serve as the “foundation of identity” (TCA, [1981] 1987, p. 138). While these three domains vary tremendously over historical time and across societies, formally and analytically all three are identified in terms of how they allow humans to negotiate and coordinate action in society. These three resource sets—meaning in relation to the objective and intersubjective worlds; legitimacy and solidarity; and the core capacities for making these distinctions—are core components of the lifeworld. As we argue here, these three resources also necessarily structure the public sphere, both in Habermas’s middle sociology of TCA and in our contemporary moment.

The third key theme that emerges in TCA is found in the specific theory of communicative action which is relevant to the possible structure of any (modern) public sphere. Everyday speech, says Habermas, comprises three distinct dimensions: the objective, social, and subjective worlds. Habermas argues that distinctions between these dimensions matter in the practical process of interpretation and judgment in everyday disagreement (e.g., asking if something is true, right, or authentically intended). He also argues that these distinctions matter in the form of argumentative discourse—the level at which disagreements over claims can be critically raised and worked through. At the formal level, he says, these distinctions allow for speakers to coordinate action, make claims about the world, and verify or disagree about those claims. As abstract as this may seem, this is precisely what is at stake when actors in the public sphere or social groupings dispute facts, disagree over solidarity and inclusion, and speak or express identities. All three dimensions—objective, social, and subjective—through which the lifeworld reproduces itself in human encounters remain oriented to communication (Neves, 2018, p. 634).

Having established this three-fold structure, Habermas proceeds to build his theory of universal pragmatics, arguing that all communication is linked to and coordinated with these three world orientations via three fundamental validity claims that are grounded in speech acts: truth claims are connected to the objective world, claims to rightness to the social–normative world, and sincerity and authenticity to the subjective world. This structure of coordination between worlds and claims is echoed in the structure of coordinated action within the lifeworld. According to Habermas, this framework makes it possible to test communication in the public sphere for truth and accuracy; it is an ideal-counterfactual framework against which cases of systematically distorted communication can be demonstrated and analyzed.

This claim of Habermas’s is often misinterpreted, particularly in the field of communication, where he is often read as assuming that this quasi-transcendental framework is an external norm that humans should strive toward, or (even more implausibly) somehow actively perform in everyday life.⁶ Here, we argue only that a framework for considering both truth- and moral-practical (normative) validity claims in the public sphere is a necessary precondition for the determination of any truth or moral claims, and that this framework is linked to the lifeworld. Whether this determination is possible, probable or practical in the contemporary communication ecology is an empirical question, and a highly contested one (Friedland et al., 2006), but a theory of the ability to formulate truth and justification claims that span the private and social aspects of the lifeworld and the public sphere is a necessary starting point (Friedland and Hove, 2016).

As Habermas concludes in TCA, in modern societies, the differentiation of the lifeworld and system actually expands the scope of peoples’ interaction contexts and frees up discursive capacities. At the same time, this differentiation is like a door that is cracked open, offering systemic access to the lifeworld: the subsystems of the economy and the state penetrate this same lifeworld, “forc[ing] assimilation of communicative action to formally organized domains of action—even in areas where the action-coordinating mechanism of reaching understanding is functionally necessary.” This provocative threat makes the structures of lifeworld accessible to both social scientific observers (like us) and, more importantly, to actors themselves (TCA, [1981] 1987, p. 403); in other words, the contemporary threat to our capacity for modern communicative reflexivity in the lifeworld is precisely what allows us thematize these threats in public—and thus to potentially resist or act on them.

Three systemic disruptions

Our reading of Habermas locates the core of the late modern public sphere at the intersection between differentiated lifeworlds and system imperatives. Following Habermas, we introduced three analytically distinct horizons (resources) of rationalization: knowledge of reality, sense of belonging to a society and sense of the self. In what follows, we juxtapose these horizons to three exemplary material, systemic disruptions that are currently shaping (democratic) societies: the intensification of inequality (society), the rapid datafication of social infrastructures (self), and the unavoidable consequences of climate change (knowledge/reality). This coupling of lifeworld domains to specific material processes is, of course, an analytic exercise; in social reality, all three paired categories are overlapping and interlinked. But for the purposes of this article, we focus on one pair at a time. For each analytical pairing, we also offer two brief selected thematizations to show how profoundly these systemic shifts are destabilizing the background assumptions that ground late modern lifeworlds. We argue that theorizing such disruptions/destabilizations is prerequisite for any contemporary reconstruction of the public sphere.

Disruption 1: Inequality/society: Crises of the sense of solidarity

In 2008, the global financial system went into a crisis that quickly cascaded out from the finance and banking systems into the “real” economy, affecting public sector finances and creating crises of political trust that eventually produced new constellations of political power (Gerstle, 2022; Tooze, 2018). The subsequent years have tested the constitutional resilience of both national democratic political systems and the minimal international governance created after World War II. The locus of capital has started shifting from the US to China; new “varieties of capitalism” are emerging (Hall & Thelen, 2009; Streeck, 2016); economies are financializing and disrupting existing business and employment patterns; and under neoliberal logics, risk is being individualized. In short, old forms of inequality are intensifying and new ones are emerging (e.g., Atkinson, 2015; Piketty, 2014; Therborn, 2013). This “return” of inequality Savage (2021) in the West suggests that fundamental changes are occurring in the collective social and political imaginaries of Western societies, disrupting lifeworld assumptions about “society.” Here we offer two exemplary themes of lifeworld assumptions that are being disrupted: the legitimacy of claims for membership and merit (reward).

Membership

The global restructuring of the capitalist economy has shaken or destroyed the livelihoods of people and communities worldwide. The collapse of the taken-for-granted life horizons of everyday life and expectations for the future has created a nostalgia for a fictitious past, one of social order and moral rectitude (e.g., Calhoun, 2013, pp. 82–120), fueling a transnational wave of reactionary politics (Lilla, 2016; Moffitt, 2016; Norris & Inglehart, 2019) in nations both large and small: the US, Europe, India, China, Russia, the Philippines, and many more. The collapse of life horizons has thus opened real social space for the arguments of populism, which maintain that only “part of the people are real people” (Müller, 2016).

Populist and xenophobic rhetoric raises questions about who belongs to “society” and has the rights that being a member of society confers. These questions are part of the “quasi-universal” discourse of lifeworld rationality—an abstract and theoretical discourse that opens space for new claims of membership and extends across historical contexts. This abstract capacity, however, is always mobilized in concrete, historically situated contexts, each of which is characterized by particular fears and anxieties. In our contemporary moment of societal destabilization, people newly experiencing economic and political precarity seek a return to an imagined past. Populist appeals to utopic nostalgia are thus demands for solidarity, however toxic and exclusionary. These demands, however, invite a counter-critique: what are the limits of how solidarity is articulated in a broader normative framework of full(er) rights of membership?⁷

Merit

After World War II, many Western societies made systematic, concerted efforts to level social stratifications based on inherited privileges and move towards more (individually) earned, recognized merits: taxes on wealth and inheritance, progressive income tax, and the expansion of public education and other “universal” opportunities were policy implementations of this principle, as was the increasing value being placed on expertise (e.g., Oppenheimer et al., 2019, pp. 1–18). Today, this broad legacy has come under pressure from neoliberalism (which, despite its transnational isomorphism, plays out very differently in different contexts). Social and economic structures that underpinned traditional lifeworld beliefs like “education is always worth it” or “hard work will be rewarded” are being weakened and destroyed. The midcentury ideal of publicly supported meritocratic advancement has been replaced by a world of privatized education and individualized risk with no promises of fairness (Sandel, 2021) as income inequality continues to increase and the rich seem to become ever richer (Gerstle, 2022).

The ideal of meritocracy that underpinned Western post-WWII societies was premised on the idea that in democratic, modern systems, elites have earned their power and thus wield it legitimately. It is this idea that has been destabilized: the loss of the lifeworld belief in reasonable equal opportunity and a social order where you can advance based on your own merit means that authority (epistemic, economic, aesthetic) has lost its legitimacy. The opportunity structure of the social order seems increasingly “fixed” (in both senses of the term), and critiques about “fairness” or “legitimacy” become (understandably) more and more systemic and totalizing—less and less about specific cases or even specific issues. These critiques are about the “elites” being aligned against the people. And just as in the case of membership, described above, these questions of fairness and merit raise fundamental questions about solidarity. While the normative assumptions about equal opportunity and merit that grounded these critiques now seem lost, nevertheless, these critiques articulate an abstract (universal) demand for fairness.

These examples, membership and merit, show what happens when lifeworld background assumptions about society are destabilized. These views are opposed in content, but both evoke similar abstract and moral grammars of justice (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Honneth, 1995, 2015): xenophobic claims about the “real people” are met with claims for extended global human rights, and theories of elite conspiracy are juxtaposed with claims for the extraordinary pressure and responsibilities for elite power holders.

Disruption 2: Datafication/personality: Crises of authenticity and legitimation

In 2008, Facebook had just passed 100 million monthly users. Today, Facebook has nearly 3 billion users worldwide—not including users of the company’s other platforms, like WhatsApp and Instagram. In just 15 years, a radically new kind of communication environment has emerged, shaped by dominance of a handful of global platforms and their search for profit (e.g., Gillespie, 2018; Moore & Tambini, 2018). This new landscape has a logic of its own, driven by a new capacity to control and manage users’ everyday engagement and to profile and target users in ways that serve the interests of commerce, political power, and intelligence (Hintz et al., 2019; Howard, 2020). The ability to collect, store and analyze data has infiltrated and changed the dynamics of traditional sources of social power: economic, political, military and ideological power are now datafied (Mann, 2013). Indeed, the harvesting and harnessing of data has become a key power resource of its own—a change that spells the arrival of a new phase of capitalism (e.g., Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2019). This is datafication: a situation where information about the interaction between digital devices (which are seen as an accurate representation of committed, behavioral choices of humans, groups, or institutions) and the ability to collect and analyze this data penetrates the practices of all institutions (politics, media, education, social services, etc.). Global data giants such as Google and Facebook (now Alphabet and Meta—name changes that suggest their all-pervasiveness) are no longer simply media or services but essential social infrastructure (see e.g., Plantin et al., 2018).

From the perspective of the lifeworld, data is now a radically effective and flexible system steering medium that penetrates all domains of human life. It allows surveillance of vastly different kinds of “behavior” (from social networks to reading habits, from consumer choices to heartbeats) and transforms this evidence into digital data that can be combined, cross-tabulated and analyzed. Data is an enhanced medium of social quantification that transforms existing institutions and serves actors of established system power (political, administrative, economic). But it also changes the relationships among these institutions and actors, transforming all of the differentiated domains of lifeworld assumptions. Here we examine the effects of datafication on the lifeworld domain that Habermas calls the personality. We thematize two aspects of datafication: the exposed private sphere and its behavioral representation of opinions.

Exposed private sphere (and loss of authenticity)

The original concept of the public sphere rested on the mutually constitutive relation of publicity and privacy: key locations of the public sphere were private (salons, coffee houses, etc.), and the concept was based on the idea that private citizens could rationalize their interests in their mutual public encounters. However, these horizontal communications, conducted out of sight of the state, allowed citizens to question the legitimacy of state (system) power. Increasingly, datafication has made surveillance capitalism possible, even easy, and the imagined private sphere has become increasingly fictional. Invasive tracking of our lifeworlds—social networks, mobility, everyday communication, reading habits, consumer choices, and even bodily functions—is about to become part of the taken-for-granted background of everyday life—part of the lifeworld itself.⁸

Datafication’s invasion of privacy creates a radical challenge to our democratic imagination, as it destabilizes the very idea of authentic private “opinions”—the idea on which the concept of the public sphere is based. Now, it appears that everyday social networks, which play a key role in the mediation of influence (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955), have been commodified and weaponized for advertising and political propaganda. The idea that individual political opinions are subject to engineering is becoming part of the social imaginary, with serious public effects; the engineering of public opinion could spell the final end of the public sphere.

Behavioral representation of opinion

In this datafied era, tracking practices are transforming how evidence about our lifeworld choices and our actions is represented to the system. The early idea (or ideology) of the public sphere relied on the idea of speech, discussion and argumentation; natural language was the medium of lifeworld communication. This fundamentally discursive notion placed rationality at the heart of the exchange of meanings and interpretations. Later operationalizations of public opinion have shifted towards more quantifiable representations. In this historical trajectory, today’s datafied infrastructures are not only another step towards quantification but also a decisive new paradigm of public opinion, as the combination of different kinds of behavioral data are taken as communicating more accurately than speech; tracked actions supposedly tell us who people “really” are—what they think rather than what they say. What is lost here is the core of rationalization: how we mutually interpret and collectively justify our diverging acts, desires and choices. This challenges our everyday assumptions about the “authenticity” of individual opinions—and thus of individual personality. The challenge datafication presents to authenticity runs deeper than concerns about enhanced propaganda (Benkler et al., 2018) or effective extraction of peoples’ opinions (Splichal, 2022). It empowers an utterly reductive reading of people’s behavior in service of creating a replicable model that accurately represents political identity—hopes, wishes, values, beliefs.⁹

Disruption 3: Climate change/systems: Crisis of realism

In the fall of 2009, world political leaders convened in Copenhagen to hammer out a plan for global action to mitigate climate change. The result of COP15 was a dire disappointment. In 2015, after difficult bargaining and negotiations, the Paris Agreement was signed. Despite these two global accords, the international community has not decisively managed to shift global climate politics. Climate change is a complex, overwhelming problem (Dryzek, 2013; Hulme, 2009). As the IPCC has put it, we need to implement “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” in order to slow climate change (Allen et al., 2018; IPCC, 2022).This wording, coming from a traditionally cautious consensus-driven scientific/political organ, indicates a kind of groping toward a radical horizon of transformation—one that goes far beyond the carbon-driven “normal” modernity that got us here. However, we have no clear historical examples to guide us; there are no examples of representative democracies, mediated public spheres, universal franchises nor wide systems of social welfare outside of the current carbon-driven modernity (Mitchell, 2013).

Like it or not, climate change will be the systemic challenge to all social institutions in all nations.¹⁰ It is also a challenge to our (late) modern lifeworld, for addressing it will change nearly everything about our daily experience, from personal mobility to eating habits, from attitudes towards immigration to worry about the livelihood of the next generation. This case destabilizes all three dimensions of Habermas’ lifeworld differentiation. Here, we focus on how climate disruption is creating a crisis in our everyday assumptions about the modern world—our “stock of knowledge” about reality. This is exemplified in the two thematizations we discuss here: the shrunken time horizon of the political future and the paradoxical crisis of realism.

Shrunken future horizons

We are increasingly aware of the urgency (and scale) of the social, systemic changes demanded by even moderately hopeful climate scenarios, and this is rapidly changing what “the future” means. First, the future is no longer a field of relatively open opportunities for progress (as progress is represented in modern social imaginaries) but rather a terrain of probabilities, alarming and existential risks, unpredictable feedback mechanisms, and complex scenarios. As our ability to scientifically model future life circumstances on earth has increased (in part due to datafication), we are increasingly incorporating this new imaginary of the future into our lifeworld assumptions. It is certain that life as we know it will be transformed in fundamental ways, but we have no idea how. This new temporal order is evident in public speech, which is saturated with words like “emergency” and “crisis.” This signals that we are already in the unstable “future” we have been modeling. Our lifeworlds (and very obviously, our children’s lifeworlds) have incorporated the idea that within our lifespans, we will be experiencing this threatening future. This produces the generational tensions of climate politics.¹¹

The crisis of realism?

An epistemologically realist look at climate science (the best knowledge we have) shows that the term “crisis”—a temporary state, to be replaced by a return to “normal”—is politically useful but likely inaccurate; we cannot assume the coming crisis “period” will be followed by a “new normal” of stability (Latour, 2018). As extreme weather events—heatwaves, followed by fire, exceptional flooding or unseasonable hurricanes, tornados–become the new normal, they translate the abstract conceptual phenomenon of “climate change” into concrete events. Nearly every summer is now the “hottest summer in history,” and we have to ask ourselves: what does an average temperature mean for young people for whom every other summer is hotter than the historical average? (Kunelius and Roosvall, 2021).

This is a paradoxical moment of realism. The progress of our scientific capabilities testifies that—scientifically speaking—our stock of knowledge about reality has increased, for we better understand the probabilities and laws of nature. But at the same time, our practical knowledge about nature and reality (about weather, seasons, etc.) is changing. This is creating an upheaval in our lifeworld horizon of realism. In other words, our knowledge about climate change disrupts the modern imaginary of a stable natural reality that grounds society, which is free to change against that stable background. Now, we see the behavior of natural reality changing under our very eyes.

Lifeworld, public and crisis: Limits and directions

In this final section, we synthesize the major theoretical threads of this argument before turning to a series of critical questions. We conclude with a brief proposal for continuing this theoretical research and linking it with empirical questions in the field.

The reconstructed concept of the public sphere

While the public sphere(s) are located at the intersection between systems and lifeworlds (or situated in both), we focused here on the lifeworld, and the sources of rationalization that can analytically be identified in its differentiated elements. We linked the differentiated lifeworld to Habermas’s notion of legitimation crisis, updating its original 1970’s meaning (state–system legitimation crisis) for the contemporary moment—its global and transnational context. Current material developments concretely threaten the resources of sense-making and action in contemporary public spheres. A moment of systemic disruptions such as this one opens an opportunity to take up the (normally taken-for-granted) background assumptions that shape rationality and reasonable action—assumptions that ground our lifeworlds. We are (possibly) entering a moment where “immanent critique” does not only mean assessing how well we live up to the abstract norms we have explicitly set for democracy; we are offered a chance to take stock of the norms themselves.

Following Habermas’ analytics from TCA then, we took up three exemplary differentiated elements (or lifeworld horizons) where rational (and reasonable) debate and action relies on these background assumptions. The lifeworlds we discuss here are based on particular assumptions about society (solidarity), self (personality), and reality (knowledge). We think through these abstract domains in the current context by juxtaposing the theoretical model of differentiated lifeworld horizons to three material disruptions that shape the era we live in and thus our social and political imaginations: economic restructuring that intensifies inequalities, datafication that changes our communication and interaction infrastructures, and the climate crisis that articulates the hard limits of earth system sustainability. These disruptions are fundamentally shaping people’s lifeworlds by destabilizing their assumptions about society, self and reality. These changing horizons form the deep background against which individuals, groups, communities and nations will have to negotiate what makes sense and coordinate their action.

Why is the crisis of the public sphere a crisis of the lifeworld?

In developing his analytical model, Habermas (TCA, [1981] 1987, p. 141ff) emphasizes two things: (1) that the three elements (rationality of knowledge, social integration and individual socialization) are closely interdependent; and (2) that this tripartite division is analytic. In relatively stable (“normal”) social conditions we would not explicitly and/or publicly talk about our background assumptions about self, society and reality; we would simply take them for granted, and our talk would rely on and draw from these assumptions. But we are not living in “normal” stable social conditions.

Here, we have connected particular systemic disruptions with specific lifeworld elements—an analytical distinction aimed at showing how particular ongoing material disruptions that (unevenly) affect the entire globe can shape critical background assumptions. We show how this process works by examining particular exemplary themes (membership, merit, authenticity, representation, future expectations, limits of realism) within the three lifeworld horizons. The return of inequality is here used as an example of a narrative where questions of solidarity and the legitimacy of the social order are articulated (and that have led to consequences that question constitutional orders and democracy). It is not the only narrative where this is taking place, nor are those the only questions being raised by intensifying inequality. Similarly, rapid datafication sharply thematizes issues of the self and the crisis of authenticity and representation (think of recent news about ChatGTP or worries about computationally enhanced propaganda). But obviously, in real life, debates about membership in society (solidarity) are entangled with forms of denial (self) and conspiratorial worldviews (knowledge). Similarly, the climate crisis is not merely a challenge of knowledge (see e.g., Boykoff, 2019; Hulme, 2009); it also articulates crises of the self, creating cognitive dissonance (denial, repression and open dishonesty) between individual lifestyles and the demand for climate action, and serves as a stress test of solidarity between generations, localities, and nations. We chose these three particular disruptions, which neatly exemplify Habermas’ three central components of the lifeworld, because they reveal contemporary ruptures in assumptions about society and social order, about personality and identity and about reality.

We argue that these three critical, widely recognized, material disruptions are potentially forming a worldwide constitutive/constitutional/systemic crisis within and across national societies and states. We could have pointed to other transformative moments or processes (the pandemic, biodiversity, immigration), and we would have found uncertainties about self, society, and reality there too. However, we argue that the conjuncture of the three exemplary systemic disruptions we have discussed here is driving constitutive crises of democracy because it shakes the foundations of the lifeworld—and thereby calls into doubt the possibility of the formation of publics at all. The entangled relationships of these trends as a whole makes our moment of the 2020s feel like an acute crisis in the everyday experience of people, social groups, and institutions.

This is both the speculative claim and potential power of our theorization: our current conjunctive crisis shows how the direct and indirect consequences of systemic powers (science and carbon technology, money, and power) can destabilize the fundamental background assumptions of late-modern lifeworlds. Here, Habermas’ concluding sentences in TCA have powerful echoes in a changed world context:

[T]he systemic imperatives of autonomous subsystems penetrate into the lifeworld and, through monetarization and bureaucratization, force an assimilation of communicative action to formally organized domains of action (…) It may be that this provocative threat, this challenge that places the symbolic structures of the lifeworld as a whole in question, can account for why they have become accessible to us (TCA,2: 403).

Problems and criticisms

There are a number of potential objections to our (preliminary) reconstruction of the concept of the public sphere, including: (1) objections to our interpretation of Habermas; (2) critique of the limits of our approach; and (3) historical-empirical limits to our theorization here. We very briefly address these objections below.

Objection 1: Misinterpretation

The first objection may be that our interpretation of Habermas’s own trajectory is wrong—that we misinterpret specific aspects of his work (e.g., the lifeworld) or even that our linkage of the concept of the public sphere to his theory of the lifeworld and rationalization elides distinctions between the public sphere (in particular the problem of deliberation) and the other, later concepts of the lifeworld and rationalization. However, in STPS, Habermas himself connects the specific concept of the public sphere to macro-level (later systemic) concepts—the political and cultural public spheres, the market—and to the meso- and micro-level processes of deliberative but informal reasoning in everyday life and “higher” more formal institutional spheres. Our argument (at least in nuce) incorporates both dimensions. Further, by anchoring the deliberative moments of the public sphere in communicative action, which is itself embedded in the lifeworld, we link the process of deliberation to its grounds in formal pragmatics (Cooke, 1994; Habermas, 1998).

Objection 2: External criticisms

Indeed, this tension around reason and rationalization is a now standard part of Habermas critiques.¹² This critique asks: does the European notion of the public sphere (or its Habermasian theoretical description) capture something even “quasi-universal,” or does it reflect only its particular perspective and social circumstances? In the words of Bhambra and Holmwood, Habermas’s work, TCA in particular, is part of a Eurocentric “modern social theory” that professes to stand “outside of history” and as such is “significantly discredited by post-positivist philosophies of science.” They seek instead a “more adequate account of modernity” that incorporates the legacy of colonialism to “more effectively address the issues of the present” (Bhambra & Holmwood, 2021, p. 1). We agree that an adequate concept of modernity must take into account the colonial past of Europe, but we do not agree that Habermas’s project in TCA professes to stand outside of history. In our view, it is precisely an attempt to reconstruct the concept of modernity such that claims to truth, solidarity, justice and self-development are grounded in capacities shared by all humans.

This matters precisely because the transformations we face are global, but the experience of crisis as pressing on the stable lifeworld of societies is experienced nationally and within a system of nations, organized hierarchically and unequally. The apparently radical criticism that claims to universal rights are “Euro-centric” actually undermines the moral power of nations outside the hegemonic powers (the US, the EU, Russia and China). These smaller nations’ claims for, e.g., climate justice necessarily rest on the moral power of solidarity. Similarly, to claim rights within nations, minorities must generate truth claims about unjust situations. Truth claims that are publicly validated lead to normative claims for justice and solidarity, which are embodied in legal claims to rights. Democracy and human rights activists across the world, from Hungary to Russia to India to the US to China, all depend on truth claims (of the suppression of rights) and normative claims to equality and justice.

Objection 3: Historical-empirical limits to our theory

The linkage between lifeworld, public, and crisis that we are proposing requires a comparative-historical reconstruction of modernity that incorporates the continuing legacy of colonialism. The universal, context-transcending elements of a theory like ours are, of course, always embedded in distinct historical societies and cultures. Indeed, a middle-range historically grounded research program would be necessary to give this framework any empirical traction. In the same way, the continuing incorporation of feminist critique is necessary. Some of this reconstructive work is being done within the Habermasian tradition: Fraser has criticized the concepts of both the public sphere (Fraser, 2014; Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018) and legitimation (2015) while continuing to argue their necessity for understanding contemporary crises and Benhabib (2018) has made parallel arguments for the concept of modernity itself. In a very different vein, Wagner (2012, 2016) has argued for a global modernity that incorporates both distinct states and cultures, building on Eisenstadt’s (2002) arguments for multiple modernities.

With the cautious remarks that will conclude this article, we choose to err on the side of optimism, a short term attitude that must speak the language of politics; hope is a longer term attitude that can allow the luxury of (possible) theoretical reconstruction.

From the perspective we have constructed, public spheres and democratic change are anchored to the lifeworld. This is both bad and good news in the current conjuncture. The bad news is that the rhythm of change in civil society and the lifeworld is deeply tied to the scale of human life. Dramatic events might speed up change (for better and worse), but a normal learning curve, one anchored in the (common) sense of everyday experience, is slow, incremental, and nonlinear. This natural rhythm seems to clash with the immediate need to form national and global public spheres with citizens capable of learning, debating, and understanding, and of forming the political will and coalitions necessary to address these global crises.

The (paradoxical) good news is that the challenges we are facing are existential and constitutive, and as these systemic disruptions grow more powerful, their violations of reason and reasonability become more obvious. According to TCA, this is the very definition of the colonization of the lifeworld. The three exemplary disruptions we have explored here are all imbricated with each other, and each affects our lifeworld assumptions in profound ways.

These lifeworld changes can be mobilized for authoritarian political gain, with personal identities becoming increasingly differentiated at the expense of solidarity; and forces of inequality (whether economic or racial, ethnic, or gender inequality) can push individuals’ exclusionary forms of identity and solidarity, as with the growth of populism. The appeal of these backward-facing utopias is that they can rely both on familiar, historical ingredients and the moral grammar of actualized lifeworlds. But in our theoretical analysis, they also must make “rationalizing” claims too, and are thus subject to becoming part of the public sphere and thus open to challenge and debate.

As the success of the climate youth movement indicates, a combination of all three spheres of validity (orientations to rationality and reason) are actually working themselves out in practice. First, the movement anchors its arguments in science—the best available cultural reference to objective reality. Second, it is a moral and normative argument about inclusion and fairness: about what is fair and right for future generations and about which constituencies have the right to have a voice. Finally, the movement makes strong claims to authenticity and autonomy: it has challenged not just right-wing ideologues, fossil fuel industries, governments, and climate deniers, but also the liberal-progressive side of climate politics.¹³ The indisputable communicative power of the movement could be taken as proof that the lifeworld’s moral and epistemological grammar—its contestation in the three dimensions of objectivity, normativity, and authenticity—actually can be mobilized to become useful in the political public sphere (see, for example, Eide and Kunelius, 2021; Marantz, 2022). This can be seen as one proof of the concept of communicative power: the concept of a binding force of motivation beyond shared belief (Habermas, 1998).

Endnotes

Funding

This work was supported by the Strategic Research Council (SRC) established within the Academy of Finland (352557).

Conflicts of interest: None declared.

References