3: Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition and Jürgen Habermas by Seyla Benhabib, in Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. (Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 1992). pp. [89]-120. -- [p. 89] -- The art of making distinctions is always a difficult and risky undertaking. Distinctions can enlighten as well as cloud an issue. One is always also vulnerable to objections concerning the correct classification of the thought of certain thinkers. This chapter will side-step questions of historical interpretation and classification in order to delineate three different conceptions of "public space" that correspond to three main currents of western political thought. The view of public space common to the "republican virtue" or "civic virtue" tradition is described as the "agonistic" one and the thought of Hannah Arendt will be the main point of reference. The second conception is provided by the liberal tradition, and particularly by those liberals who, beginning with Kant, make the problem of a "just and stable public order" the center of their political thinking. This will be named the "legalistic" model of public space. The final model of public space is the one implicit in Jürgen Habermas's work. This model, which envisages a democratic-socialist restructuring of late-capitalist societies, will be named "discursive public space." By situating the concept of "public space" in this context, the discussion is restricted from the outset to normative political theory. The larger sense of the term Öffentlichkeit, which would include a literary, artistic and scientific public, will not be of concern here; for whatever other applications and resonances they might have, the terms "public," "public space," "res publica" will never lose their intimate rootedness in the domain of political life. This approach will help highlight certain very significant differences among political theories all of which on the surface appear to accord central place to "public space" or "publicity" in political life. Not only are there important differences among these three conceptions of public space, but two of these views are severely limited in their usefulness for analyzing and evaluating political discourse and legitimation -- 90 -- problems in advanced capitalist, and possibly even in what is now being referred to as "soviet style," societies. 1 When compared with the Arendtian and liberal conceptions, the strength of the Habermasian model is that questions of democratic legitimacy in advanced capitalist societies are central to it. Nevertheless, whether this model is resourceful enough to help us think through the transformation of politics in our kinds of societies is an open question. Taking the women's movement and the feminist critique of the public/private distinction as a point of reference, the final sections of this chapter will probe the discourse model of public space from this point of view. Hannah Arendt and the Agonistic Concept of Public Space Hannah Arendt is the central political thinker of this century whose work has reminded us with great poignancy of the "lost treasures" of our tradition of political thought, and specifically of the "loss" of public space, of der öffentliche Raum, under conditions of modernity. Hannah Arendt's major theoretical work, The Human Condition, is usually, and not altogether unjustifiably, treated as an antimodernist political work. By "the rise of the social" in this work, Arendt means the institutional differentiation of modern societies into the narrowly political realm on the one hand and the economic market and the family on the other. As a result of these transformations, economic processes which had hitherto been confined to the "shadowy realm of the household" emancipate themselves and become public matters. The same historical process which brought forth the modern constitutional state also brings forth "society," that realm of social interaction which interposes itself between the "household" on the one hand and the political state on the other. 2 A century ago, Hegel had described this process as the development in the midst of ethical life of a "system of needs" (System der Bedürfnisse), of a domain of economic activity governed by commodity exchange and the pursuit of economic self-interest. The expansion of this sphere meant the disappearance of the "universal", of the common concern for the political association, for the res publica, from the hearts and minds of men. 3 Arendt sees in this process the occluding of the political by the "social" and the transformation of the public space of politics into a psuedospace of interaction in which individuals no longer "act" but "merely behave" as economic producers, consumers and urban city dwellers. This relentlessly negative account of the "rise of the social" and the decline of the public realm has been identified as the core of Arendt's political "anti-modernism." 4 Indeed, at one level Arendt's -- 91 -- text is a panegyric to the agonistic political space of the Greek polis. What disturbs the contemporary reader is perhaps less the high-minded and highly idealized picture of Greek political life which Arendt draws but more her neglect of the following constellation of issues. The agonistic political space of the polis was only possible because large groups of human beings like women, slaves, laborers, non-citizen residents, and all non-Greeks were excluded from it and made possible through their "labor" for the daily necessities of life that "leisure for politics" which the few enjoyed; by contrast, the rise of the social was accompanied by the emancipation of these groups from the "shadowy interior of the household" and by their entry into public life; is Arendt's critique of this process also a critique of political universalism as such? Is the "recovery of the public space" under conditions of modernity necessarily an elitist and anti-democratic project which can hardly be reconciled with the demand for universal political emancipation and the universal extension of citizenship rights that have accompanied modernity since the American and French revolutions? 5 Yet it is greatly misleading to read Hannah Arendt primarily as a nostalgic thinker. She devoted as much space in her work to analyzing the dilemmas and prospects of politics under conditions of modernity as she did to the decline of public space in modernity. If we are not to read her account of the disappearance of the public realm as a Verfallsgeschichte (a history of decline) then, how are we to interpret it? The key here is Arendt's odd methodology which conceives of political thought as "storytelling." Viewed in this light, her "story" of the transformation of public space is an "exercise" of thought. Such thought exercises dig under the rubble of history in order to recover those "pearls" of past experience, with their sedimented and hidden layers of meaning, such as to cull from them a story that can orient the mind in the future. 6 The vocation of the theorist as "story teller" is the unifying thread of Arendt's political and philosophical analyses from the origins of totalitarianism to her reflections on the French and American revolutions to her theory of public space and to her final words to the first volume of The Life of the Mind on "Thinking". I have clearly joined the ranks of those who for some time now have been attempting to dismantle metaphysics, and philosophy with all its categories, as we have known them from their beginning in Greece until today. Such dismantling is possible only on the assumption that the thread of tradition is broken and we shall not be able to renew it. Historically speaking, what actually has broken down is the Roman trinity that for thousands of years united religion, authority, and tradition. The loss of this trinity does not destroy the past... What has been lost is the continuity of the past... What you then are -- 92 -- left with is still the past, but a fragmented past, which has lost its certainty of evaluation. 7 Read in this light, Arendt's account of the "rise of the social" and the decline of public space under conditions of modernity can be viewed not as a nostalgic Verfallsgeschichte but as the attempt to think through the human history sedimented in layers of language. We must learn to identify those moments of rupture, displacement and dislocation in history. At such moments language is the witness to the more profound transformations taking place in human life. Such a Begriffsgeschichte is a remembering, in the sense of a creative act of "re-membering", that is, of putting together the "members" of a whole, of a rethinking which sets free the lost potentials of the past. "The history of revolutions... could be told in a parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana." 8 Nonetheless, Arendt's thought is not free of assumptions deriving from an Ursprungsphilosophie which posits an original state or temporal point as the privileged source to which one must trace back the phenomena such as to capture their "true" meaning. As opposed to rupture, displacement and dislocation, this view emphasizes the continuity between the past origin and the present condition, and seeks to uncover at the origin the lost and concealed essence of the phenomena. There are really two strains in Hannah Arendt's thought, one corresponding to the method of fragmentary historiography, and inspired by Walter Benjamin, 9 the other inspired by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, and according to which memory is the mimetic recollection of the lost origins of phenomena as contained in some fundamental human experience. In accordance with this latter approach, reminders abound in the The Human Condition of "the original meaning of politics" or of the "lost" distinction between the "private" and the "public." 10 The concept that perhaps best illustrates Arendt's equivocation between fragmentary history and Ursprungsphilosophie is that of "public space." This topographical figure of speech is suggested early on in her work, at the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, to compare various forms of political rule. Constitutional government is likened to moving within a space where the law is like the hedges erected between the buildings and one orients oneself upon known territory. Tyranny is like a desert; under conditions of tyranny one moves in an unknown, vast, open space, where the will of the tyrant occasionally befalls one like the sandstorm overtaking the desert traveler. Totalitarianism has no spatial topology: it is like an iron -- 93 -- band, compressing people increasingly together until they are formed into one. 11 Indeed, if one locates Arendt's concept of "public space" in the context of her theory of totalitarianism, it acquires a rather different focus than the one dominant in The Human Condition. The terms "agonistic" and "associational" can capture this contrast. According to the "agonistic" view, the public realm represents that space of appearances in which moral and political greatness, heroism and preeminence are revealed, displayed, shared with others. This is a competitive space, in which one competes for recognition, precedence and acclaim; ultimately it is the space in which one seeks a guarantee against the futility and the passage of all things human: "For the polis was for the Greeks, as the res publica was for the Romans, first of all their guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals." 12 By contrast, the "associational" view of public space suggests that such a space emerges whenever and wherever, in Arendt's words, "men act together in concert." 13 On this model, public space is the space "where freedom can appear." 14 It is not a space in any topographical or institutional sense: a town hall or a city square where people do not "act in concert" is not a public space in this Arendtian sense. But a private dining room in which people gather to hear a Samizdat or in which dissidents meet with foreigners become public spaces; just as a field or a forest can also become public space if they are the object and the location of an "action in concert," of a demonstration to stop the construction of a highway or a military airbase, for example. These diverse topographical locations become public spaces in that they become the "sites" of power, of common action coordinated through speech and persuasion. Violence can occur in private and in public, but its language is essentially private because it is the language of pain. Force, like violence, can be located in both realms. In a way, it has no language, and nature remains its quintessential source. It moves without having to persuade or to hurt. Power, however, is the only force that emanates from action, and it comes from the mutual action of a group of human beings: once in action, one can make things happen, thus becoming a source of a different kind of "force." The distinction between the "agonal" and the "associational" models corresponds to the Greek as opposed to the modern experience of politics. The agonal space of the polis was made possible by a morally homogeneous and politically egalitarian, but exclusive community, in which action could also be a revelation of the self to others. Under conditions of moral and political homogeneity and lack of anonymity, the "agonal" dimension, the vying for excellence -- 94 -- among peers, could take place. But for the moderns public space is essentially porous; neither access to it nor its agenda of debate can be predefined by criteria of moral and political homogeneity. With the entry of every new group into the public space of politics after the French and American revolutions, the scope of the public gets extended. The emancipation of workers made property relations into a public-political issue; the emancipation of women has meant that the family and the so-called private sphere become political issues; the attainment of rights by non-white and non- Christian peoples has put cultural questions of collective self- and other- representations on the "public" agenda. Not only is it the "lost treasure" of revolutions that eventually all can partake in them, but equally, when freedom emerges from action in concert, there can be no agenda to predefine the topic of public conversation. The struggle over what gets included in the public agenda is itself a struggle for justice and freedom. The distinction between the "social" and the "political" makes no sense in the modern world, not because all politics has become administration and because the economy has become the quintessential "public," as Hannah Arendt thought, but primarily because the struggle to make something public is a struggle for justice. Perhaps the episode which best illustrates this blind spot in Hannah Arendt's thought is that of school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. Arendt likened the demands of the black parents, upheld by the US Supreme Court, to have their children admitted into previously all-white schools, to the desire of the social parvenue to gain recognition in a society that did not care to admit her. This time around Arendt failed to make the "fine distinction" and confused an issue of public justice -- equality of educational access -- with an issue of social preference -- who my friends are or whom I invite to dinner. It is to her credit, however, that after the intervention of the black novelist, Ralph Ellison, she had the grace to reverse her position. 15 At the root of Arendt's vacillations on this issue lies a more important problem, namely her phenomenological essentialism. In accordance with essentialist assumptions, "public space" is defined either as that space in which only a certain type of activity, namely action as opposed to work or labor, takes place or it is delimited from other "social" spheres with reference to the substantive content of the public dialogue. Both strategies lead to dead-ends. Let us note that the differentiation of action types into labor, work and action, and the principle of public space operate on different levels. Different action-types, like work and labor, can become the locus of "public space" if they are reflexively challenged and placed into question from the standpoint of the asymmetrical power relations governing them. To give a few examples: obviously "productivity quotas" in -- 95 -- the factory workshop, how many chips per hour a worker should produce, can become matters of "public concern," if the legitimacy of those setting the quotas, their right to do so, their reasons for doing so are challenged. Likewise, as recent experience has shown us, even the most intricate questions of nuclear strategy, like the number of nuclear warheads on a missile, the time required to diffuse them etc. can be "reclaimed" by a public under conditions of democratic legitimacy and become part of what our "res publica" is about. Arendt, by contrast, relegated certain types of activity like work and labor, and by extension most, if not all, issues of economics and technology to the "private" realm alone, ignoring that these activities and relations, insofar as they are based on power relations, could become matters of public dispute as well. Likewise, the attempt to define "public space" by specifying the agenda of the public conversation is futile. Even on Arendtian terms, the effect of collective action in concert will be to put ever new and unexpected items on the agenda of public debate. Arendt herself in the "associational" model developed not a substantive but a procedural concept of public space, which is in fact compatible with this view. What is important here is not so much what public discourse is about as the way in which this discourse takes place: force and violence destroy the specificity of public discourse by introducing the "dumb" language of physical superiority and constraint and by silencing the voice of persuasion and conviction. Power alone is generated by public discourse and is sustained by it. From the standpoint of this procedural model, neither the distinction between the social and the political nor the distinction between work, labor or action are that relevant. At stake is the reflexive questioning of issues by all those affected by their foreseeable consequences and the recognition of their right to do so. When compared to Hannah Arendt's reflections, the advantage of the liberal concept of public space is that the link between power, legitimacy and public discourse is made most explicit by it. Yet this model is also more sterile than the Arendtian one in that it conceives of politics too closely along the analogy of juridical relations, thereby losing that emphasis on spontaneity, imagination, participation and empowerment which Arendt saw to be the mark of authentic politics whenever and wherever it occurred. The Liberal Model of Public Space as "Public Dialogue" With his model of "liberal dialogue," Bruce Ackerman expresses a fundamental tenet of contemporary liberalism: liberalism is a form of political culture in which the question of legitimacy is paramount. 16 -- 96 -- Liberalism is a way of talking about and publicly justifying power, a political culture of public dialogue based on certain kinds of conversational constraints. The most significant conversational constraint in liberalism is neutrality, which rules that no reason advanced within a discourse of legitimation can be a good reason if it requires the power holder to assert two claims: (a) that his conception of the good is better than that asserted by his fellow citizens; or that (b) regardless of his conception of the good, he is intrinsically superior to one or more of his fellow citizens. 17 Bruce Ackerman bases his case for public dialogue "not on some general feature of the moral life, but upon the distinctive way liberalism conceives of the problem of public order." 18 His question is how different primary groups, about whom we only know that they do not share the same conception of the good, can "resolve the problem of coexistence in a reasonable way." 19 Ackerman believes that citizens in a liberal state must be guided by a Supreme Pragmatic Imperative (SPI) which states that they must be willing to participate in an ongoing dialogue about their conception of the good with others who are not members of their primary group. Ackerman is concerned to find a justification of this imperative that will not fall into the three traps which traditionally affect moral philosophies of liberalism. One must find a justification of the SPI that is not based on trumping, that is, already asserting as supreme one moral view over others. Furthermore, one cannot assume, as utilitarians do, that there is a translation manual neutral enough in its language and in terms of which all our various moral commitments can be stated. According to Ackerman, such a translation manual would violate the sense of the good of one of the parties. Finally, one cannot ask the parties to assume a "transcendental perspective" as the precondition for entering into dialogue. Such a transcendental perspective, let us say the point of view of the "original position" or that of the "ideal speech situation," abstracts so radically from the condition of existing differences that it forces the parties to the public dialogue to assent to moral truths which they do not hold. The way out is the path of "conversational restraint." When you and I learn that we disagree about one or another dimension of the moral truth, we should not search for some common value that will trump this disagreement; nor should we try to translate our moral disagreement into some putatively neutral framework; nor should we seek to transcend our disagreement by talking about how some hypothetical creature would resolve it. We should simply say nothing at all about this disagreement and try to solve our problem by invoking premises that we do agree upon. In restraining ourselves in this way, we need not lose the chance to talk to one another about our -- 97 -- deepest, moral disagreements in countless other, more private, contexts. Having constrained the conversation in this way, we may instead use dialogue for pragmatically productive purposes: to identify normative premises all political participants find reasonable (or, at least, not unreasonable. 20 (Emphasis added) The pragmatic justification of "conversational restraint" is not morally neutral; this justification trumps certain conceptions of the good life in that it privatizes them and pushes them out of the agenda of public debate in the liberal state. 21 Not only members of certain religious groups, who may still seek to convert others to their faith, but also all groups working for the radical change of the social structure would then have to withdraw from the public arena of the liberal state into other more "private" contexts. The difference between my defense of a communicative ethic which also "trumps" certain conventional views of morality and Bruce Ackerman's defense of conversational restraints is that on the model of practical discourse following from communicative ethics, no issues of debate and no conceptions of the good life are precluded from being voiced in the public arena of the liberal state. Ackerman and I agree that conventional views of morality are not likely to be impartial and comprehensive enough to allow the public coexistence of differing and competing conceptions of the good life. Thus they cannot serve as the moral foundations of a liberal-democratic state. Yet they should be allowed to exist in such a state as partial conceptions of the good which enjoy an equal public forum with other more comprehensive views. 22 The pragmatic justification not only trumps but also "transcends" for it asks the parties to the conversation to agree to "say nothing at all about" fundamental disagreements. It is unclear why this agreement not to talk about fundamental disagreements in public is any less loaded or controversial an assumption than the idea of a "veil of ignorance" which asks us to feign ignorance about our conception of the good. If I am deeply committed to the belief that prevalent conceptions of sexual division of labor in our societies are morally wrong because they oppress women and hinder their full expression of themselves as human beings, why should I agree not to do the best I can to make this a public issue and to convince others of my point of view? Or suppose I am a member of the Israeli opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza territories. I consider this occupation wrong not on pragmatic grounds but on moral grounds, because I believe that the occupation is corrupting the ethical values of the Jewish people. I may well be aware that under current conditions, public opinion is so divided that I stand no chance of winning assent; nevertheless is it unreasonable of me to -- 98 -- seek the widest possible forum of public discussion and participation to air my views, rather than to agree with you, as Ackerman advocates, not to talk about what is of most concern to me. Either Ackerman's justification of the SPI is based on stronger moral grounds than he admits to or it cannot claim the supreme status it is supposed to enjoy. 23 But is the path of conversational restraint indeed so arbitrary? Why not regard it as one of those procedural constraints on dialogue that we all have to agree to on reasonable, moral grounds, even if not wholly pragmatic ones? The idea of conversational restraint, as it has been presented so far, presupposes a questionable moral epistemology which implicitly justifies a separation between the public and the private that is oppressive to the concerns of certain groups. On these grounds as well its moral persuasiveness is limited. By the "moral epistemology" of the conversational restraint model I mean the following. The liberal theorist of conversational restraint presupposes that the primary groups to the conversation already know what their deepest disagreements are even before they have engaged in the conversation. These groups already seem convinced that a particular problem is a moral, religious or aesthetic issue as opposed to an issue of distributive justice or public policy. While we can legitimately discuss the second, says the liberal theorist, let us abstract from the first. Take, however, issues like abortion, pornography and domestic violence. What kinds of issues are they? Are they questions of "justice" or of the "good life"? The moral or political theorist is in possession of no moral dictionary or moral geometry in this matter such as would allow her to classify these issues as being matters of "justice" or of the "good life." In part it is the unconstrained public dialogue that will help us define the nature of the issues we are debating. Certainly, as citizens and as theorists we enter the public fray with a set of more or less atriculated, more or less preformed opinions, principles and values. As democratic citizens and theorists we are participants in a debate, but we should not seek to define the agenda of the debate. We may, on the basis of more or less well supported principles and values, wish to maintain that abortion should be considered a matter of individual choice for the women involved; but it is not a (non- existent) consensus about the kind of issue this is that leads us to this position. Rather principles of moral autonomy and moral choice, the right of women to self-realization, and some sensitivity to the often tragic and irreconcilable aspects of our value commitments inform our views. Indeed citizens must feel free to introduce, in Bruce Ackerman's words, "any and all moral arguments into the conversational field." For it is only after the dialogue has -- 99 -- been opened in this radical fashion that we can be sure that we have come to agree upon a mutually acceptable definition of the problem rather than reaching some compromise consensus. The issue of pornography illustrates my point well. This question has been so divisive and has created such strange and unholy alliances -- as between Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell for example -- that it is the paradigm example of the kind of moral disagreement that the modus vivendi liberal may urge us to agree not to publicly disagree about. This, however, is precisely what we should not do at this stage of the debate. Whether pornography is to be defined as a question of the reasonable limitations to be imposed upon the First Amendment right of free speech; whether pornography is to be thought of as a private, moral issue concerning matters of sexual taste and style; whether pornography is to be thought of as a matter of aesthetic- cultural sensibility and as a question of artistic fantasy -- we simply cannot know before the process of unconstrained public dialogue has run its course. I no more want to live in a society which cannot distinguish between Hustler magazine and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye than Ackerman does, or in a society that would place Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence in the company of Deep Throat. As sensitive as one may be to the traditional liberal fear that unlimited public conversation might erode those few constitutional guarantees we can rely upon, the reprivatization of issues that have become public only generates conceptual confusion, political resentment and moral outrage. I consider limitations upon the content and scope of public dialogue, other than constitutional guarantees of free speech, to be unnecessary. A normative theory of such conversational constraints fails to become a critical model of legitimation. An additional limitation of the liberal model of public space is that it conceives of political relations all too often narrowly along the model of juridical ones. The chief concern expressed by the idea of "dialogic neutrality" is that of the rightful coexistence of different groups, each subscribing to a different conception of the good, in a pluralistic society. The just in modern societies, it is said, should be neutral vis-a- vis fundamental assumptions concerning the good life. Neutrality is indeed one of the fundamental cornerstones of the modern legal system: modern, promulgated law, unlike ancient and customary law, should not "ethically" mold character but should provide the space within which autonomous individuals can pursue and develop various conceptions of the good life. Even under conditions of a modern, pluralist, democratic society, however, politics is about something other than "neutrality." Democratic politics challenges, redefines and renegotiates the divisions between the good and the just, the moral and the legal, the private and the -- 100 -- public. For these distinctions, as they have been established by modern states at the end of social and historical struggles, contain within them the result of historical power compromises. To illustrate. Before the emergence of strong working-class movements and the eventual establishment of social-welfare type measures in European countries and North America, questions relating to the health of workers in the workplace, problems of accidents on the job, and in our days, the harmful side-effects of certain chemicals, were frequently construed by employers as issues of "trade secrets" and "business privacy." As a result of political struggles the definition of these issues were transformed from trade secrets and private business practices to major issues of "public concern." The principle of liberal neutrality is not helpful in guiding our thoughts on such matters. All it says is that once this redefinition and political renegotiation of the right and the good has occurred, then the law should be neutral; that is OSHA (Office of Safety and Health Administration) should be neutral in