CONTESTING CONSENSUS: REREADING

HABERMAS ON THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Patchen Markell

Communicative reason is of course a rocking hull - but it does not go under in

the sea of contingencies, even if shuddering in high seas is the only mode in
which it ‘copes’ with these contingencies.
Jiirgen Habermas

In the last several years, political theorists have made increasingly frequent
use of the concept of the “public sphere” to analyze political phenomena
ranging from the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe to feminist
activism in the United States.’ Enthusiasm for the concept of the public
sphere was spurred in part by the 1989 publication of an English translation
of Jurgen Habermas’s early work, Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere,* and in part by the astoundingly fertile revival of interest in the
political theory of Hannah Arendt, which Habermas has cited as an
inspiration for his own effort to reconstruct a concept of action distinct from
instrumental or strategic c ~ n d u c t . ~
The renaissance of the concept of the public sphere has given rise to
vigorous theoretical disputes, and one of the most important of these
involves the viability of the concept of the public sphere under the
conditions of postmodernity .4 Jean-Franqois Lyotard has argued that the
normative concept of the public sphere is governed by an ideal of
“consensus” that is “outmoded and suspect” - outmoded, because the
condition of postmodernity is characterized by the plurality and in-
commensurability of “language-games” ; and suspect, because the pursuit of
consensus “does violence” to this plurality and thereby constrains possibilities
for authentic political action.’ In an important 1992 essay, Dana Villa
challenged the stark opposition between postmodernism and public sphere
theory by stressing the distinctions between Habermas’s and Arendt’s
accounts of the public sphere.6 Against Habermas, Villa suggests, Lyotard’s
objection is indeed damning. But the objection carries no weight against
Arendt’s theorization of the public sphere, which valorizes not rational
consensus but “an agonistic subjectivity that prizes the opportunity for
individualizing action, ’” By demonstrating the “specificity” of Arendt’s
agonistic idea of the public sphere, Villa sought both to resist the
assimilation of Arendt’s work to a Habermasian paradigm, and to point out

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378 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
certain unexpected affinities between postmodernism and the idea of the
public sphere.*
Villa’s essay succeeds both at bringing Arendt out from under Habermas’s
shadow and at suggesting connections between Arendtian agonism and
postmodernism. Unfortunately, in trying to dissolve the sedimented
opposition between the idea of the public sphere and postmodernism, Villa
inadvertently contributes to the hardening of another, equally pernicious
false dichotomy - this time, between Habermas, the thinker of consensus,
and Arendt, the theorist of the agon. This dichotomy - hardly unique to
Villa’s essay - is worrisome not merely because it involves a misreading of
Habermas, but also because it begs important substantive questions about
the place of consensus and contestation in the public sphere. In particular,
Villa implies that we are faced with a choice between, on the one hand, a
consensus-oriented account of the public sphere which allows us to
distinguish legitimate from illegitimate institutions only at the cost of
“repress[ing]” the “spontaneity, initiation, and difference that characterize
agonistic speech,”’ and, on the other hand, a theorization of agonistic
subjectivity which brackets questions of legitimacy and abandons the goal
of consensus but which thereby manages to “keep plurality, debate, and
difference alive rather than seeking to shut them down via a formalistic
decision procedure.””
Arendt herself suggests that political theory should resist such hardened
oppositions by “thinking together and combining meaningfully what our
present vocabulary presents to us in terms of opposition and contra-
diction.”” In this spirit, Villa used Arendt’s work to resist the terms of the
opposition between postmodernism and the public sphere; in the same
spirit, this essay argues that Habermas’s and Arendt’s models of the public
sphere are neither opposed nor identical, but complementary. The
perception of a sharp dichotomy between them, I shall claim, is reinforced
both by a misunderstanding of the idea of “consensus” and its role in
Habermas’s reconstruction of the normative content of the idea of the
public sphere, and by a lack of attention to the place of the concepts of
reflexivity and fallibilism in Habermas’s recent writings.
This rereading of Habermas proceeds in two stages. Since many critics of
Habermas’s deployment of the concept of consensus explicitly or implicitly
compare his work to the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the first section
of the essay proceeds in the mode of intellectual history, and investigates
the relations among Arendt, Habermas, and Rousseau. An examination of
Arendt’s On Revolution and Habermas’s Structural Transformation reveals
that both theorists are motivated by an aversion to the homogenizing,
authoritarian implications of Rousseau’s account of the general will: in
direct response to Rousseau, rather than in allegiance to him, Habermas
conceives of democratic politics as an unending process of contestation,

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 379
conducted with the critical awareness that no actually existing settlement
can constitute a satisfactory embodiment of the regulative idea of
agreement. This exploration of intellectual history has two purposes: on the
one hand, it is meant to stand on its own as a refutation of the crude
reduction of Habermas to a twentieth-century exponent of a Rousseauian
politics of the general will. But, more importantly, it is also meant to clear
the ground for an unconventional rereading of Habermas’s theorization of
the public sphere. When we read Habermas’s systematic works not as the
latter-day incarnation of a naive Enlightenment fantasy of autonomy and
transparency, but instead against the background of his critique of
Rousseau - for whom these very same fantasies motivated a dangerous
attack on plurality in politics12 - we will be better prepared to discover
affinities between Habermas’s theorization of the public sphere and
Arendtian agonism.
These affinities are described in detail in the second section of the essay,
which discusses the meaning of Habermas’s characterization of the public
sphere as a realm of discourse “oriented toward agreement,” the implications
of Habermas’s fallibilistic notions of truth and validity, and the importance
of the reflexivity of public discourse. In a “ p ~ ~ t - ~ ~ n ~ e n t i society
o n a l ’ in
’~~
which every settlement ought in principle to be open to further contestation
and in which no issue, not even the rules of discussion themselves, can be
excluded from the political agenda, it would be a mistake to interpret the
“orientation toward agreement” as a standard that can justify the exclusion
of “spontaneity, initiation, and difference” from a regularized and
normalized public sphere. Indeed, reading Habermas somewhat against the
grain, I shall try to show that the existence of a vigorous public sphere
characterized by agonistic political action is among the very conditions of
the possibility of democratic legitimacy. Habermas’s and Arendt’s differences
thus constitute a productive tension rather than a silent incompatibility.
Agonistic political action depends upon the existence of relatively stable
and secure spheres in which it can thrive, but those spheres, to remain
properly democratic and political, demand the very sort of contestatory
political action which threatens their stability. The delicate negotiation of
these intertwined imperatives is among the tasks that belongs not to theory
but to the agon of plural politics itself.

I. The Problem of Democratic Sovereignty: Responding to Rousseau

a. Rousseau’s politics of unanimity
Ulrich Preurj has remarked that Rousseau’s concept of the “general will”
presents us with “a problem that democratic theory and democratic praxis
to this day have not resolved” - the problem of reconciling rationality with

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popular ~overeignty.’~ In Rousseau’s famous formulation, the democratic

general will replaces the king in the seat of sovereignty, allowing the whole
body of citizens simultaneously to rule and be ruled, and thereby to remain
free even while submitting to the constraints of political society.” Yet
Rousseau also insists that the general will is distinct from the “will of all,” or
the mere numerical aggregation of the wills of individual citizens, for it is
directed toward the common good; the general will must embody not only
democracy but also rationality.I6 Preuf3 explains: “If the general will is
oriented per definitionern toward the common good - if it is the will of the
people joined together into a whole and concerned with the whole - but if it
at the same time emerges out of the empirical wills of all the individual
members of society, then there must be some way to guarantee that these
individuals will in accordance with the common good; that is, that they will
rationally and j u ~ t l y . ” ’ ~
By most accounts, Rousseau’s own solution to this “paradox of
democratic legitimacy”18- the appeal to a “legislator” who can “compe[l]”
people “to conform their wills to their reason”” - is unsatisfactory because
it sacrifices democratic politics at the altar of rationality. As Seyla Benhabib
argues, value-pluralism has become a constitutive element of modern
political life, and Rousseau’s appeal to the unifying force of the legislator -
whether the legislator is understood in a weak sense as the founder of a new
civic religion or in a strong sense as an authoritarian “figure of charismatic
authority” who compels conformity among citizens - cannot do justice to
this persistent plurality.20.Margaret Canovan has made the same criticism of
Rousseau even more stridently: Rousseau’s political thought, she argues,
“cannot cope with the actual diversity of real people,” and so “tries in the
end to do away with what Arendt calls ‘the human condition of
plurality.’ 7’21
This charge of hostility toward plurality levelled against Rousseau’s
politics of the general will closely resembles frequent criticisms of
Habermas’s account of the public sphere. Indeed, Habermas’s concept of
an “orientation toward agreement” has explicitly been compared to
Rousseau’s attack on plurality. Canovan, for example, has identified
Habermas as the most recent thinker to be inspired by Rousseau’s “attempt
to overcome human plurality by converting a multitude into one being
willing one will.”22Likewise, Villa characterizes Rousseau as a theorist who
“desired an escape from politics . . . to the security and comfort of a
harmonious general will,” and claims that Habermas is an inheritor of this
“rationalist attempt to reduce, if not eliminate, what Arendt calls the
‘incessant discourse’ born of p l ~ r a l i t y . ”Why
~ ~ do critics like Canovan and
Villa find an affinity between Rousseau and Habermas? How does
Habermas himself describe the relationship between his work and the
philosophy of his predecessor? The latter question will lead us from

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 38 1
intellectual history into Habermas’s systematic writings, which are the
concern of the second section of this essay. To answer the former question,
however, we must consider the view of Rousseau that inspires both
Canovan and Villa: Arendt’s critique of Rousseau in On Revolution as the
theorist of the French Revolution and the Terror.

b. Arendt’s critique of compassion

Arendt’s critique of Rousseau, by her own description, centers upon his
appeal to “compassion” and his related discovery of the “sphere of
intimacy” in which compassion manifested itself .24 Rousseau’s political
thought “cannot be understood,” Arendt insists, “without taking into
account the crucial role compassion had come to play in the minds and
hearts of those who repared and of those who acted in the course of the
French Revolution.”P
Rousseau writes in a famous passage in the Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality that the capacity to feel compassion -the “innate repugnance to
see [our] fellow-man suffer” - is a natural human characteristic that
remains, hidden but preserved, below the hardened layers of indifference
and sophistication that civilization has applied to our souls.26For Rousseau,
the key to knowing one another lies in self-knowledge, which is accomplished
through the introspective examination of our own hearts. In the “sweet
delight of intimacy,” Arendt says in a gloss on Rousseau, “compassion
became talkative,”*’ and “the magic of compassion was that it opened the
heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of others, whereby it established and
confirmed the ‘natural’ bond between men, which only the rich had lost.”28
The capacity for compassion thus points toward the utopian possibility of a
complete transparency and solidarity among people in which each experi-
ences all others’ sufferings as his own - a condition of solidarity that
collapses what Arendt calls the “worldly space” between people .29
Rousseau articulated this political ideal of compassionate unity in the realm
of theory, and Robespierre “brought it on to the market-place with the
vehemence of his great revolutionary ~ r a t o r y , ” ~ appealing
’ to “the
compassion of those who did not suffer with those who were rnalheureux” as
“the one force which could and must unite the different classes of society
into one n a t i ~ n . ” ~ ’
Compassion is a dangerous foundation on which to build a political order,
Arendt thinks, for three related reasons. First, the feeling of compassion is
experienced as an immediate and direct connection with one’s fellow human
beings; for this reason, when compassion appears in politics, it effaces the
plurality of those distinctive personae and perspectives that constitute the
political world; the plural people become the mass of what Robespierre
called le peuple. When Robespierre brought compassion into the public

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realm, Arendt writes, “he lost the capacity t o establish and hold fast to
rapports with persons in their singularity; the ocean of suffering around him
and the turbulent sea of emotion within him, the latter geared to receive
and respond to the former, drowned all specific considerations . . .,932
Second, this same immediacy of compassion also encourages political
violence of the sort that characterized the revolutionary Terror in France.
“Compassion speaks only to the extent that it has to reply directly to the
sheer expressionist sound and gestures through which suffering becomes
audible and visible in the world,” Arendt writes, and when it replies to
suffering, compassion “will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of
persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law
and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim
for [sic] swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of
violence, ”33
Third and most importantly, Arendt charges that the reliance upon
compassion in politics can lead only to a spiral of suspicion and violence
which, in the Reign of Terror, took the form of a “war upon h y p o c r i ~ y . ” ~ ~
The virtue of compassion, Arendt suggests, is a characteristic of the heart
and therefore has the property of i n t e r i ~ r i t yevidenced
,~~ by Rousseau’s
own emphasis on introspection as a tool with which we can penetrate the
opaque shell of modern humanity and explore the natural, authentic
sentiments that lie beneath it, in the sphere of intimacy.36 But if
characteristics of the heart are inherently “interior,” if they cannot even be
imagined except by contrast with a potentially inauthentic surface appear-
ance - if, in Arendt’s enigmatic description, these characteristics “need
darkness and protection” in order to “remain what they are meant to be”37
- then it will be impossible for compassion as such ever to appear, and the
political project of founding legitimate government on the sentiment of
compassion will be haunted by the perpetual suspicion of inauthenticity, of
“hypocrisy and deceit.”38 Such suspicion generates a “never-ending fight to
ferret out the hypocrites” in which every claim to possess authentic
compassion and therefore to speak for “the people” is revealed to be
nothing but a mask. This infinite regress imperils Rousseau’s various
efforts, personal and political, t o achieve an unobstructed view of himself
and of human virtue, leading him (as Jean Starobinski has documented)
into an “embittered philosophy” that can only “long for deliverance” from
the human condition of opacity.39 In politics, this vicious cycle had
murderous consequences: “It was the war upon hypocrisy,” Arendt
concludes, “that transformed Robespierre’s dictatorship into the Reign of
Terror.’”
Each of Arendt’s criticisms of the role of compassion in politics has a
parallel in her discussion of the concept of the general will. First, the
effacement of plurality effected by the compassionate bond between people

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corresponds to the necessary unity of the general will, which dissolves the
plurality of citizens into the singularity of the people. “Rousseau took his
metaphor of a general will seriously and literally enough,” Arendt writes,
“to conceive of the nation as a body driven by one will, like an individual
. . . it was precisely in this sense that Robespierre demanded: ‘I1 faut une
volontk UNE . . .’ ”41 Second, Arendt’s criticism of the indifference toward
mediating political institutions generated by the immediacy of the sentiment
of compassion corresponds to her claim that the concept of the general will
tends to “exclude all processes of exchange of opinions.” Because “there is
no possible mediation between wills,” Arendt says, a political order based
“not in the worldly institutions which this people had in common, but in the
will of the people themselves” will be an unstable order indeed.42 And
third, the difficulties involved in the public display of authentic compassion
are paralleled by the elusiveness of the entity called “the people,” which
was the bearer of the general will and the democratic “substitute” for the
absolute monarch.43 Rousseau demanded that “the people” bearing the
general will be present and not merely represented,4 but Arendt observes
that every equation of an actual group or individual with the idealized
“people” inevitably involved a relationship of representation, the authentic-
ity and legitimacy of which was open to doubt. Even les enragks, Arendt
points out, spoke in “perhaps not the true voice of the people, but certainly
the very real voice of those whom even Robespierre had identified with the
people .”45 For Arendt, Rousseau’s expression of the paradox of democracy
remains trapped within the orbit of traditional concepts of sovereignty and
legitimation because it tries to conceptualize a new entity called “the
people” to take the place of old, pre-democratic absolutes - God, for
example, or the monarch. But while according to such older conceptions,
sovereignty could plausibly be made present - the king can sit on the throne
and appear before the people - “the people” are, like compassion,
unpresentable: any effort to point to this elusive entity in which ratio and
voluntas are democratically united is doomed to frustration. In a democratic
age, as Claude Lefort says, the throne of sovereignty vacated by the
monarch must remain an “empty place.”46
Arendt’s criticisms of Rousseau’s concept of the general will and of his
reliance on compassion are thus meant to clear the ground for her recovery
of the really valuable and important experience that came out of the
democratic revolutions in France and especially in the United States, which
she calls the “lost treasure” of the “revolutionary traditi~n”:~’the
experience of freedom in and through political action, which does not mean
freedom merely in the sense of a liberty from the state guaranteed by a
constitution, but rather the “experience of man’s faculty to begin something
~ ~ the basis of this historical
new,” unique, and ~ n p r e d i c t a b l e .On
experience, Arendt reconceptualizes politics in terms of non-sovereign,

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agonistic, and performative action oriented not toward the solidification of

a single general will but toward the active resistance of such homogenization
through the generation and articulation of the differences that are, and
ought to be, constitutive of political life.49

c. Habermas, compassion, and the public sphere

On the basis of this reading of Arendt’s critique of Rousseau, it is possible
to see why critics of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere might find
affinities between Habermas and R o u ~ s e a uBeginning
.~~ with the publica-
tion of Structural Transformation in German in 1962, Habermas has
engaged both explicitly and implicitly with Rousseau, often showing more
sympathy for Rousseau than Arendt ever displayed. Structural Transforma-
tion, for example, is an ambitious attempt to arrive at the outlines of an
ideal-type of public sphere by examining the historical origin and decline of
a particular set of empirical publics: the bourgeois public spheres of France,
Britain, and Germany, which had their roots in the seventeenth century,
flourished in the eighteenth, and were simultaneously broadened and
perverted in the nineteenth and twentieth. The importance of Rousseau for
Habermas’s story is already evident by the second chapter, where
Habermas explains that the critical, political public sphere that best
approximated the fully-developed bourgeois ideal grew out of an earlier
phenomenon - the experience of intimacy - that began in the family.
Habermas explains:
To be sure, before the public sphere explicitly assumed political functions in
the tension-charged field of state-society relations, the subjectivity originating
in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family created, so to speak, its own
public . . . It provided the training ground for a critical public reflection still
preoccupied with itself - a process of self-clarification of private people
focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel p r i v a t e n e ~ s . ~ ~

Later in the chapter, in a section entitled “The Bourgeois Family and the
Institutionalization of a Privateness Oriented to an Audience,” Habermas
emphasizes the importance of the literary form of the letter as the locus of
this early experience of intimacy. “In the intimate sphere of the conjugal
family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from
the private sphere of their economic activity - as persons capable of
entering into ‘purely human’ relationships with one another. The literary
form of these at the time was the letter. It is no accident that the eighteenth
century became the century of the letter: through letter writing the
individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity.”’* Indeed, on Habermas’s
account, Rousseau was among those who brought to full flower this method
of exploring the terrain of intimacy: “When Rousseau used the form of the

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novel in letters for La Nouvelle Heloise and Goethe for Werthers Leiden,
there was no longer any holding back. The rest of the century reveled
and felt at ease in a terrain of subjectivity barely known at its begin-
ning.”53
Thus it seems that Habermas locates the origin of the bourgeois public
sphere precisely in that realm that Arendt identified as most threatening to
authentic publicity: the private, intimate sphere in which people establish
bonds with one another as “purely human” beings, freed of the annoying
obstructions plastered onto their natural selves by what Rousseau regarded
as the corrupting force of civilization. Indeed, as Habermas reports, the
mode of communion with oneself and others facilitated by letter-writing
was immediate and emotional, no less than the “compassion” that Arendt
so extensively criticizes. “In the jargon of the time,” Habermas writes, “the
letter was considered to be an ‘imprint of the soul,’ a ‘visit of the soul’;
letters were to be written in the heart’s blood, they were practically to be
wept.”54This sort of subjectivity and communication, Habermas says, later
“explicitly assumed political functions in the tension-charged field of state-
society relation^."^^ If Habermas regards the public sphere as an extension
of a form of communication directed, like Rousseauian compassion, at
immediate solidarity and transparency among people, then perhaps there
are grounds for suggesting that Habermas is an inheritor of the Rousseauian
project of overcoming the plurality of the political world.
Yet such a claim seems to be contradicted by Habermas’s subsequent
critique of Rousseau in Structural Transformation and elsewhere. In the
fourth chapter of Structural Transformation, for example, Habermas
returns to Rousseau in a different key. Now echoing Arendt, Habermas
objects both to Rousseau’s fetishization of unity and to the immediacy of the
general will, which, Habermas complains, shunned “critical discussion in
the public sphere” and promised “a consensus [more] of hearts than of
arguments .”56 Habermas explains in a recent reappraisal of Structural
Transformation how his own account of the democratic public sphere
diverges from the politics of the general will:

To be sure, the intersubjectivist formulation of a concept of solidarity that

links the establishment of understandings (Verstundigung) to validity claims
that can be criticized, and therewith to the ability on the part of individuated
subjects fully in a position to make up their own minds (zurechnungsfuhig) to
announce their disagreement (Neinsagenkhnen), already does away with the
usual connotations of unity and wholeness. However, even in this abstract
formulation the word “solidarity” must not suggest the false model of a
formation of will a la Rousseau that was intended to establish the conditions
under which the empirical wills of separate burghers could be transformed,
without any intermediary, into the wills, open to reason and oriented toward
the common good, of moral citizens of a state.57

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Finally and most importantly, Habermas has made clear that his account
of the democratic public sphere altogether abandons Rousseau’s effort to
fill the throne of the sovereign, and thereby breaks with the traditional
method of legitimating political order by appealing to an “absolute” that
can be made present. In Rousseau, Habermas claims, “the concept of
sovereignty remained bound to the notion of an embodiment in the
assembled, physically present people ,”58 while in Habermas’s version of
proceduralism, sovereignty is “completely dispersed” in “subjectless forms
of communication which regulate the flow of discursive will and opinion-
formation in such a way that their fallible results have the presumption of
practical r a t i ~ n a l i t y . ”Habermas
~~ stresses that it is doubtful that one can
speak anymore of “embodied” sovereignty in such a “decentered society,”
and suggests that the idea that such a decentered “network of associations”
could take the place of the united “body of the people” and occupy the
“vacant seat of sovereignty” is misleadingly concrete .60 Indeed, an
Arendtian flavor can be detected in one of Habermas’s recent explanations
of communicative reason, where the themes of unpredictability and open-
endedness, so prominent in Arendt’s theorization of non-sovereign action
as a new beginning, take on an important role:

The analysis of the necessary conditions for mutual understanding in general

at least allows us to develop the idea of an intact intersubjectivity, which
makes possible both a mutual and constraint-free understanding among
individuals in their dealings with one another and the identity of individuals
who come to a compulsion-free understanding with themselves. This intact
intersubjectivity is a glimmer of symmetrical relations marked by free,
reciprocal recognition. But this idea must not be filled in as the totality of a
reconciled form of life and projected into the future of a utopia. It contains no
more, but also no less, than the formal characterization of the necessary
conditions for the unforeseeable forms adopted by a life that is not misspent.
No prospect of such forms of life can be given to us, not even in the abstract,
this side of prophetic teachings.61

Habermas’s effort to reclaim the concept of the public sphere by

returning to its eighteenth-century genesis is thus extremely careful and
selective. While Habermas acknowledges the critical political potential of
the experience of freedom and the practices of communication that began in
the bourgeois literary publics, he is also wary, like Arendt, of the
antipolitical effects of the aspirations to transparency and unmediated
community that were also characteristic of those early public spheres.
Habermas himself clearly believes he is attempting to break radically from
certain aspects of the theoretical tradition inaugurated by Rousseau. Contra
his Arendtian critics, his systematic writings suggest (as we shall now see)
that he succeeds.

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11. Consensus and Contestation in Public Sphere Theory

In the years since the publication of Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, Habermas has moved away from the strategy of deriving the
idealized presuppositions of the political public sphere from the charac-
teristics of a particular historical epoch. This strategy, he has recently
admitted, gave rise to a certain degree of confusion by inadequately
distinguishing “an ideal type and the very context from which it was
constructed”;62 this ambiguity, in turn, left his account open to criticism
from those’ who rightly stressed the various exclusions, of women in
particular, which had characterized the bourgeois public sphere from its
inception.63 Habermas has thus sought to give a more precise and
systematic specification of the ideal-type of “rational-critical discourse” that
had been relatively vaguely described in Structural Transformation and to
anchor this specification in an investigation of the “rational potential
intrinsic in everyday communicative practice^."^^ On the basis of the
general theory of communicative action and, more specifically, the model
of discourse ethics that have resulted from this linguistic inquiry, Habermas
has returned to the phenomenon of the public sphere and the issues of
popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy: just as discourse ethics
identifies the necessary procedural presuppositions of the conduct of
rational argument in post-conventional societies, Habermas’s discourse-
centered democratic theory grounds democratic legitimacy in the institu-
tionalization of procedures of public discussion and reasoning that are
consistent with those discursive standards of r a t i ~ n a l i t y . ~ ~
The aspect of Habermas’s accounts of communicative action and
discourse ethics to which many of his critics have objected most strongly is
his description of communicative action (including the conduct of argu-
mentation in discourses) as being oriented toward understanding, agree-
ment, or consensus.66 For Habermas, an orientation toward agreement is
the feature that most sharply distinguishes communicative from strategic
action, and this distinction is at the center of his critique of the
“colonization of the lifeworld” by technical and instrumental rati~nality.~’
But for some critics, even those who are sympathetic to Habermas’s
ultimate aim of protecting politics and ethics against the threat posed by the
spread of instrumental reason, Habermas’s emphasis on consensus in his
account of the public sphere threatens to efface the agonistic dimension of
political action in the same way that Rousseau’s theory of the general will
threatened to suppress plurality in politics. If the public sphere is conceived
as a space of dialogue among citizens in which all speech is governed by the
ultimate telos of arriving at a consensus, this objection runs, then speech
which seeks to challenge agreements, t o reintroduce a plurality of opinion
into the public sphere, or to give voice to perspectives that cannot be

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acknowledged within the rules of discourse that govern a given public will
be delegitimated and discouraged. Dana Villa, following Lyotard, calls this
effect the “flattening, antiagonistic, antiinitiatory character of the consensus
model.”68
In the remainder of this essay, I argue that Habermas’s model of the
public sphere is less susceptible to this criticism than Villa, Lyotard, and
others imagine. This argument has two parts: first, I examine in closer detail
the function of the ideas of understanding, agreement, and consensus in
Habermas’s discourse ethics and theory of the public sphere in order t o
show that the Habermasian public sphere is at least compatible with the sort
of agonistic and contestatory speech and action with which Villa and others
are concerned. This demonstration will require, in particular, an explication
of the idea of an “orientation toward agreement” as well as a consideration
of the relationship among understanding, agreement, and consensus in
Habermas’s work. In the second part, I go further to argue that Habermas’s
characterization of discourse as reflexive and his fallibilist concept of validity
make agonistic and contestatory speech and action not merely permissible
but essential components of a democratic public sphere.

a. Understanding and consensus in Habermas

In a clear and convenient overview, Maeve Cooke summarizes the
significance of the ideas of understanding and consensus in Habermas’s
theory of communicative action: “Communicative action,” she writes, “is a
form of social interaction in which the plans of action of various agents are
coordinated through an exchange of communicative acts - that is, through a
use of language (or of corresponding extra-verbal expressions) oriented
toward understanding (Verstundigung). Habermas also refers to such
a use of language as the use of language oriented toward consensus
(Einverstundnis).”69
When we try to make sense of this description, however, we immediately
encounter a problem about its status. The claim that “participants in
communicative action are oriented toward agreement” might merely be a
phenomenological description of an essential aspect of language: the use of
language or of extralinguistic forms of communication always occurs against
the horizon of possible mutual understanding and agreement between
speakers. On this weak interpretation of Habermas’s claim, the description
of communicative action as ’oriented toward agreement says nothing
whatsoever about whether the accomplishment of consensus is likely in any
given case, nor whether it is desirable, and it says nothing about the motives
or intentions of particular discussants. It merely takes note of a constitutive
feature of language as such: the possibility that linguistic communication
will eventually result in an agreement among people.

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 389
On the other hand, the claim that “participants in communicative action
are oriented toward agreement” might be taken not only as a phenomeno-
logical description of human communication but also as a normatively
powerful criterion for distinguishing different ways of using language. On
this strong interpretation of Habermas’s claim, speech acts that are not
oriented toward agreement do not count as communicative action; ethical
decisions or political settlements which are produced through the influence
of such speech can be criticized as irrational; and the institutions of the
public sphere may be deployed to neutralize the power of such irrational
speech.
Most criticisms of Habermas’s emphasis on consensus and understanding
presuppose that Habermas is making the second, stronger claim. The worry
that a Habermasian public sphere will tend to “shut down . . . plurality,
debate, and difference” (Villa) is only plausible if we suppose that the
characteristic of “orientation toward agreement” is meant to serve as a
criterion for distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable speech acts. Thus,
one easy answer to Habermas’s critics would be to endorse the weak
interpretation of his characterization of communicative action as oriented
toward agreement. But it is also clear that the weak interpretation of
Habermas’s claim is too weak; Habermas clearly does intend “orientation
toward agreement” to have some critical, normative force, for the very idea
of an orientation toward agreement is introduced as a contrast to the
potentially coercive orientation toward success that characterizes strategic
action and instrumental rationality. To treat Habermas’s claim as a weak
phenomenological description of language would be to sacrifice Habermas’s
critique of the colonization of the lifeworld by instrumental reason, an
important task to which much of Habermas’s work has been devoted.
There is a way, however, in which the distinction between the weak and
strong versions of Habermas’s claim can still be useful. But we cannot
understand how this distinction is to be employed until we have examined
the meaning of the different terms that are translated as “agreement” in
Habermas’s texts: Verstundigung and Einverstundnis. As Maeve Cooke has
correctly observed, Einverstundnis fairly unambiguously refers to a state of
agreement, while the fuzzier Verstundigung “suggests less the state of having
reached agreement than the process of reaching agreement .’”’ Cooke
further argues that there is an internal connection between Verstundigung
and Einverstundnis - or, in English, between the process and end-state
senses of the “orientation toward agreement.” She writes that the “process
of intersubjective critical evaluation” implied by the term Verstundigung
“has, by definition, [a] genuine consensus,” or Einverstundnis, “as its
implicit aim .”7’ Because Habermas “suggests that we cannot imagine
seriously entering into discussion with others . . . if we do not simultaneous1
imagine that we and the other participants have agreement as our goal,” * Y

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390 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
Cooke argues, Habermas’s theory finds both the process of reaching
agreement and the condition of agreement itself to be “ d e ~ i r a b l e . ”But~~
here I believe Cooke is confusing the two registers - descriptive and
normative - that I distinguished earlier in contrasting the “weak” and
“strong” interpretations of the idea of an orientation toward agreement.
This confusion is at the heart of the agonist criticism of Habermas, and in
order to dispel the confusion, we must return to the critical distinction out
of which Habermas’s idea of an “orientation toward agreement” first arose:
the contrast between an orientation toward agreement and the orientation
toward success that characterizes strategic action and instrumental
rationality.
In the Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas defines the “orienta-
tion toward agreement”74 that characterizes authentic communicative
action wholly negatively, as a refrainingfrom the pursuit of “perlocutionary”
effects in speech - that is, effects upon a listener that are “causally
produced” and which are “external to the meaning of what is said” (such as
the effect of fright that might, but might not, be produced by my asserting
that there is an insect on your shoulder).75 “I count as communicative
action,” writes Habermas, “those linguistically mediated interactions in
which all participants pursue illocutionary aims, and only illocutionary
aims, with their mediating acts of c ~ m m u n i c a t i o n . ”The
~ ~ most important
characteristic of perlocutionary effects, for our purposes, is that (unlike
illocutionary aims) they are wholly external to the validity claims raised by
an utterance, and therefore are not subject to contest and challenge in
discourse. Perlocutionary effects are, in this sense, coercive.
Habermas’s discussion of understanding in Theory of Communicative
Action makes it clear that the two different “orientations” under considera-
tion have less to do with the outcomes or states of affairs that are desired by
communicative and strategic actors but rather with the means that each sort
of actor intends to use to accomplish the desired outcomes. The contrast
between the end-states of “agreement” and “success” is not, as such, of
interest to Habermas: what is important is the fact that an authentic
agreement, if it is to exist at all, can only arise out of a coercion-free
discursive procedure in which speakers are free to challenge and contest the
validity claims raised by various utterances, while “success” can be
produced by “outside influence” or “the use of violence” as easily as
through free discussion .77 Consequently, to be “oriented toward agree-
ment,” an actor need not have agreement as the goal of his or her action or
speech, nor must the action or speech be likely to produce agreement. An
“orientation toward agreement” simply means a foreswearing of the
mechanisms of coercion and influence - a foreswearing of perlocution - in
the pursuit of one’s goals and a correspondin commitment to provide
reasons for one’s claims if they are challenged. R
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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 39 1

If this is the case, how are we to make sense of Habermas’s claim, cited
by Cooke, that participants in communicative action are not only “oriented
toward Verstundigung” but also have “Einverstundnis” as their goal? In a
mundane sense, it may be true that we cannot imagine anyone bothering to
participate in an argumentative discourse if he or she did not hope
eventually to win the assent of the other participants. But while to say that
agreement is what each participant in a discourse desires may be an
accurate phenomenological reconstruction of the communicative actor’s
perspective toward argumentation, it does not imply that the condition of
agreement as such is normatively desirable in the same way that the
procedures of rational deliberation are normatively preferable to violence.
That is, while the normative distinction between the procedures of rational
deliberation and the use of violence allows us to criticize political
arrangements that are based on coercion, the simple fact that we cannot
imagine an argument in which the participants did not hope to arrive at
some agreement does not give us any further critical leverage; contra
Lyotard, there is no contrasting category called “action aimed at disagree-
ment” which this fact allows us to call illegitimate. To return to the
distinction between “weak” and “strong” interpretations: I suggest that
Habermas’s account of an “orientation toward agreement” ought to be
understood as a strong, normative claim with respect to the procedures that
make agreement possible, but merely as a weak phenomenological claim
with respect to the condition of agreement itself. This reading of Habermas,
which is consistent with his own critique of Rousseau and with his
cautionary note that the idea of Verstundigung “must not be filled in as the
totality of a reconciled form of a life and projected into the future as a
utopia,”79 allows us to preserve the critical force of his distinction between
communicative and strategic action while avoiding the misleading impression
that Habermas sanctions the suppression of agonistic and contestatory
speech and action in the name of consensus.*o

b. Agonistic political action and democratic legitimacy

The foregoing discussion has tried to show that Habermas’s idea of an
“orientation toward consensus” is consistent with agonistic and contestatory
political speech and action. To bring this essay to a close, I want to make a
stronger claim: that on Habermas’s account of discursive democracy, a
legitimate democratic system is not only compatible with agonistic action
but actually requires it. This conclusion will follow from an examination of
two other aspects of Habermas’s account of communicative action and
discourse ethics: the fullibilistic nature of validity and the reflexivity of
discourse. Once again, both of these have been well-summarized by Cooke:
Habermas’s fallibilism consists in his claim that “all actual agreements

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392 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
reached as to the validity of a claim are always in principle subject to
revision in the light of new relevant arguments,”” and the reflexivity of
discourse consists in the self-critical nature of communication, which is
“guided by the idealizing supposition that no argument is in principle
immune to critical evaluation in argumentation.”82 When extended to the
theory of the public sphere, fallibilism and reflexivity have important
political consequences: on the one hand, the fallibilism of Habermas’s
account of validity means that the outcomes of the discursive procedures of
the political public sphere have only a “presumption” of rationality and are
; ~ ~the other hand, the reflexivity of
always open to further c o n t e ~ t a t i o non
discourse means nothing is immune to contestation in the public sphere, not
even the nature of the procedures by which public discussion is conducted.
“In the game of democracy,” as Benhabib has observed, “the rules of the
game no less than their interpretation and even the position of the umpire
are essentially contestable .”84
These doctrines of fallibilism and reflexivity must not be misunderstood
in a weak liberal sense as merely implying an individual right to criticize
existing settlements or agreements. In the first place, Habermas clearly
intends the description of communicative rationality as fallibilist and
reflexive to have some positive sociological content: it does not merely
express a normative principle, but also describes a fact of increasing
plurality and accelerating contestation of traditions and norms hitherto
regarded as “settled.” “The transitory unity that is generated in the porous
and refracted intersubjectivity of a linguistically mediated consensus not
only supports but furthers and accelerates the pluralization of forms of life
and the individualization of lifestyles,” Habermas writes, concluding that
“more discourse means more contradiction and d i f f e r e n ~ e . ” ~ ~
Even more importantly, when we try to imagine how the principles of
fallibilism and reflexivity would affect the theory of democratic legitimacy,
we find that democratic legitimacy in postconventional societies is a
function not merely of a formal legal right to contest existing settlements
and agreements, but of the vigor with which such contestation actually
occurs in the peripheral network of public spheres into which the
mechanisms of government are connected. We have already seen that other
characteristics of rational discourse translate into necessary (though
underdetermining) constraints on legitimate democratic institutions: the
norm of mutual respect, for example, suggests that democratic institutions
must allow equal chances for participation by all citizens if they are to be
legitimate (though mutual respect does not specify the particular form of
participation that is to be permitted).86 But what are the corresponding
characteristics by which one could distinguish a democratic public sphere in
which validity claims are treated as merely fallible and in which no claims
are in principle exempt from contestation from a public sphere in which the

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 393
results of deliberation, once achieved, are taken to be fixed and
unchallengeable and in which certain presuppositions are insulated from the
scrutiny of critical discussion? The mere existence of a formal legal right to
contest existing agreements cannot be taken as evidence that a public
sphere is authentically reflexive and fallibilistic, since structural forms of
social coercion and discipline can discourage participation in public
discussion, insulate existing arrangements from criticism, and restrict the
public agenda regardless of the existence of liberal constitutional
guarantees.
The only satisfactory evidence that a democratic public sphere does
operate according to the principles of reflexivity and fallibilism is the actual
occurrence of critical and contestatory speech and action in which the
provisionality of all validity-claims is made manifest - and in this way, the
normative content of the ideas of reflexivity and fallibilism is reconnected
with the sociological reality of increasing pluralization and difference that is
captured in Habermas’s description of postconventional society. Of course,
one cannot specify how much criticism and contestation is “enough” to
make a democratic system legitimate - but one can appeal to the principles
of reflexivity and fallibilism to critique the very tendency toward “normaliza-
tion” that Villa, for example, thinks the Habermasian public sphere
encourages. Far from “leav[ing] unexamined the self-surveillance of the
civically virtuous citizen (who has internalized the hegemonic conception of
the public good) or communicatively rational agent (who has internalized
the hegemonic conception of what constitutes ‘the better arg~ment’,”’~ the
norms of fallibilism and reflexivity allow a critique of this sort of structural
pressure toward regularization just as much as they allow a critique of
asymmetrical rights of access to the public sphere.
Habermas’s most recent work, Faktititut und Geltung,w comes closest to
acknowledging this constitutive role of contestatory political speech and
action in the maintenance of democratic legitimacy. Here, Habermas
identifies law as the institution that mediates “between facts and norms” -
that is, between the factical, actually existing understandings of a particular
historical moment and the infinitely deferred ideal in the name of which the
citizens of a vigorous democratic public sphere contest merely factical
agreements. Such an institution, Habermas writes, cannot subsist merely on
the basis of a right of political participation. Rather, “constitutional
democracy depends on the motivations of a population accustomed to
liberty . . . the structures of a vibrant civil society and an unsubverted
political public sphere must bear a good portion of the normative
r
expectations, es ecially the burden of a normatively expected democratic
genesis of law.” Most important of all, Habermas here acknowledges the
fragility of democratic legitimacy, which results from its paradoxical depend-
ence on unpredictable and potentially disruptive modes of political action.

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394 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
The paradoxical achievement of law thus consists in the fact that it reduces
the conflict potential of unleashed individual liberties through norms that can
coerce only so long as they are recognized as legitimate on the fragile basis of
unleashed communicative liberties . . . Social integration thereby takes on a
peculiarly reflexive shape: by meeting its need for legitimation with the help
of the productive force of communication, law takes advantage of a
permanent risk of dissensus to spur on legally institutionalized public
discourses. 9o

c. Conclusion: Between Habermas and Arendt

Villa, Canovan, Lyotard, and others have presented an image of Habermas
which encourages us to imagine his public sphere as a place in which
discussion is drained of its critical vitality by the imperatives of consensus
and cooperation, really radical questioning is closed off by the power of a
hegemonic conception of rationality that admits of no challenge, and
participants are conditioned by this conception of rationality to direct their
conversation toward the overarching telos of consensus - even if this means
silencing their own disagreements for the sake of the whole, just as
Rousseau’s citizens sacrificed their private interests for the sake of the
general welfare. This essay has tried to show that Habermas’s account of
the public sphere, quite to the contrary, not only permits but requires the
sort of agonistic, non-sovereign, creative, and potentially disruptive action
that Villa and others worry will be suppressed by the rules of communicative
rationality. Just as Arendt points toward the unpresentability of “the
sovereign people” in a democratic age, Habermas recasts the theory of
democratic legitimacy in a modest form, eschewing the task of identifying a
new sovereign in favor of describing the nature of democratic politics after
sovereignty, a democratic politics for which open-endedness is not a failure
but a necessary and constitutive feature. In such a vision of democratic
politics, agonistic political action in which existing agreements are shattered
and differences are expressed is not treated as alien and threatening, but is
paradoxically embraced and encouraged as a condition of the fragile
presumption of democratic legitimacy.
This essay, however, has been about the persistence of plurality and
contestation, and so it is especially important to avoid closing on a facile
note of reconciliation. Habermas’s and Arendt’s accounts of the public
sphere are not, after all, the same. But the differences between them do not
render them utterly incompatible. They are differences of tone and
emphasis; differences that generate fruitful and talkative tensions rather
than the silence of total otherness. Habermas’s interest in demonstrating
the viability of communicative rationality leads him to emphasize the
idealistic moment implicit in communication - its anticipation of a future
consensus - while Arendt’s central concern with the preservation of

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 395
plurality leads her to emphasize the capacity of political action to interrupt
and contest existing agreements. The question of the appropriate balance
between the hopeful tone that anticipates consensus and the contestatory
tone that reminds us of the limits of every effort to realize that hope is itself,
in every case, a political question. How much dissensus can a political
community tolerate and remain a community? How much consensus can it
tolerate and remain both democratic and political? No theoretical synthesis of
Arendt and Habermas will answer these questions, for together they mark
out the space of the political, the “space between persons” who, though
different, are bound in friendship by their wonder at the plurality of the
human world.

NOTES

I would like to thank Seyla Benhabib, Michael Ferguson, Bonnie Honig, and Dana Villa
for very helpful conversations about and comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1. See in general Craig C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992); Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), especially chapter 8; and Bruce Robbins, ed., The
Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). For further
references see Arthur Strum’s extensive “Bibliography of the Concept of Offentlichkeit,”
New German Critique 61 (Winter 1994): 161-202.
2. Jiirgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989). For critiques of Habermas see the essays in Calhoun, Habermas and
the Public Sphere, as well as Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A
Feminist Reconsideration” and Marie Fleming, “Women and the ‘Public Use of Reason’,’’
both in Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse
(New York: Routledge, 1995).
3. On Hannah Arendt and the public sphere, see Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public
Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas” in Situating the Self:
Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge,
1992), 89-120; Benhabib, “Feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space,”
History of the Human Sciences 6: 2 (1993): 97-1 14; Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow:
Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen”; Bonnie Honig, “Towards an Agonistic
Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity”; and Joan B. Landes, “Novus Ordo
Saeclorum: Gender and Public Space in Arendt’s Revolutionary France,” all in Bonnie
Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1995). On Habermas’s own interpretation of Arendt, see his “Hannah
Arendt: On the Concept of Power” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 173-89. as well as “On the German-Jewish
Heritage,” Telos 44 (Summer 1980): 127-31.
4. Other important controversies concern the intellectual lineage of the concept of the
public sphere, the history of public spheres in various societies, the role of gender in the
construction of the concept of the public sphere and the relationship between feminist
political theory and public sphere theory.
5. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
66, xxv.
6. Dana R. Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” American Political Science

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396 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
Review 86: 3 (September 1992): 712-22. See also Villa’s exchange with James A. Johnson:
“Public Sphere, Postmodernism and Polemic,” American Political Science Review 88: 2
(June 1994): 427433. Hereafter, Villa’s contribution to the exchange will be cited as
“Response.”
7. Villa, “Postmodernism,” 717.
8. Villa, “Response,” 431.
9. Villa, “Postmodernism,” 716.
10. Villa, “Response,” 431.
11. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Pelican Books, 1973), 224.
12. This perspective on Rousseau’s political theory, shared by Arendt and Habermas, is
itself contestable. For an alternative and more sympathetic view of Rousseau which de-
emphasizes Rousseau’s drive for unanimity in the self and the political community see Tracy
B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1994).
13. In Habermas’s usage, “post-conventional” societies seem to be those societies in
which individuals assume a critical distance from traditional practices and roles.
14. Ulrich K. PreuB, “Was heiBt radikale Demokratie heute?” in Die Ideen von 1789 in
der deutschen Rezeption, ed. Forum fur Philosophie Bad Homburg (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1989), 39 (my translation).
15. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). Book I, Chapter VI, “On the Social Compact.”
16. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Book 11, Chapter 111, “Whether the General Will
Can Err.”
17. PreuB, “Was heiBt radikale Demokratie heute?” 40.
18. The phrase is borrowed from Seyla Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models
of Democratic Legitimacy,” Constellations 1: 1 (April 1994): 28. Benhabib’s account of this
“paradox” and PreuB’s description of Rousseau’s “problem” are very similar.
19. Rousseau, On the Social Contract, Book 11, Chapter VI, “On Law,” 38.
20. Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality,” 30, 34.
21. Margaret Canovan, “Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics,” The
Journal of Politics 45: 2 (May 1983): 292.
22. Ibid., 297.
23. Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political (Princeton: Princeton
Univesity Press, 1996), 71.
24. Other Arendt scholars have noted important aspects of Arendt’s critique of
Rousseau, but none pays sufficient attention to the idea of compassion. Margaret Canovan,
for example, emphasizes Arendt’s effort to do justice to the human condition of plurality
which Rousseau attempts to deny, while James Miller claims that Arendt’s “misreading” of
Rousseau in terms of compassion masks “a far more subtle and provocative fear” of the will
as such as a basis for politics. See Canovan, “Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in
Politics,” 294-5; and James Miller, “The Pathos of Novelty: Hannah Arendt’s Image of
Freedom in the Modern World,” in Melvyn A. Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of
the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 187.
25. Arendt, On Revolution, 79.
26. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters,
trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964). 130.
27. Arendt, On Revolution, 88.
28. Ibid., 81.
29. Ibid., 86. Arendt’s emphasis on Rousseau’s social and psychological concern with self-
knowledge and compassion is echoed both in Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988) and in Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
30. Arendt, On Revolution, 81.

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31. Ibid., 79.
32. Ibid., 90.
33. Ibid., 8 6 8 7 . Cf. also 92: “The direction of the French Revolution was deflected
almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering;
it was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it
was actuated by the limitless immensity of both the people’s misery and the pity this misery
inspired. The lawlessness of the ‘all is permitted’ sprang here still from the sentiments of the
heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”
34. Ibid., 99.
35. Cf. ibid., 95-96.
36. Ibid., 88.
37. Ibid., 96.
38. Ibid.
39. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5.
40. Arendt, On Revolution, 99.
41. Ibid., 76. This is the aspect of Arendt’s critique that Canovan emphasizes.
42. Ibid. This, again, is the part of Arendt’s critique that James Miller has brought into
the foreground.
43. Ibid., 156. This, I believe, is the aspect of Arendt’s critique of Rousseau that Canovan
and Miller overlook.
44. Rousseau, O n the Social Contract, Book 11, Chapter 1, “That Sovereignty is
Inalienable,” 29.
45. Arendt, On Revolution, 110. Emphasis added.
46. Claude Lefort, “The Question of Democracy” in Democracy and Political Theory,
trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17. See also “The
Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in the same volume. Compare Arendt’s discussion
of sovereignty and its incompatibility with plurality in The Human Condition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1958), 234ff: “Only under the assumption of one god (‘One is
one and all alone and evermore shall be so’) can sovereignty and freedom be the same.
Under all other circumstances, sovereignty is possible only in imagination, paid for by the
price of reality” (235). In Rousseau’s case, sovereignty would be possible only if one
imagines that “the people” are one - as the doctrine of the general will suggests.
47. See chapter six of On Revolution, “The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost
Treasure.”
48. Arendt, O n Revolution, 34. On the difference between political freedom and civil
rights, see 31-32.
49. Several authors have contributed to the elucidation of the agonistic character of
Arendt’s account of action. See for example Villa’s “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,”
which argues that “from Arendt’s point of view, plurality is not just a condition, but also an
achievement of political action and speech: these activities give public expression to
difference. The theory of political action presented in The Human Condition takes as its
ideal an agonistic subjectivity that prizes the opportunity for individualizing action” (717).
Bonnie Honig also foregrounds the potential of Arendtian agonistic political action as a
vehicle of resistance to the settlement and closure of political questions and the
normalization of political behavior. See her Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chapter four. Seyla Benhabib also calls one of
Arendt’s models of public space “agonal,” but it should be noted that in Benhabib’s use, the
contrast between “agonal” and “associational” has less to do with the capacity of each model
of the public sphere to accommodate contestation and difference and more to do with the
reification of the boundary between public and private: “The agonistic space of the polis,”
Benhabib writes, “was made possible by a morally homogeneous and politically egalitarian
but exclusive community in which action could also be a revelation to the self to others . . .
but for 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.” Seyla Benhabib,

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398 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
“Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jurgen Habermas” in
Craig C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 78-79. Thus, those characteristics
that Honig associates with Arendtian agonism - what Honig calls the “rupture of Arendtian
action, its politicizing component, its commitment to resistibility, its animus to responsible
subjectivity, its enmity toward too much order, its perpetual augmentation of institutional
settlements and individual identities” (1 18) -actually authorize, for Honig, the same sort of
critique of Arendt’s reification of the public-private boundary that Benhabib undertakes. On
Honig’s “amended” account of Arendt, the public realm is not a “specific place” but rather a
“metaphor for a variety of spaces, both topographic and conceptual, that might occasion
action”; moreover, on Honig’s account, “nothing is ontologicallyprotected from politicization
. . . nothing is necessarily or naturally or ontologically not political. The distinction between
public and private is seen as the performative product of political struggle, hard won and
always temporary.”
50. For example, Habermas says in Structural Transformation that Rousseau “with all
desirable clarity provided the foundation for the public’s democratic self-determination”
(96); elsewhere, he says that “the procedural type of legitimacy” - which Habermas saw
himself as developing further - “was first worked out by Rousseau.” “Legitimation Problems
in the Modern State” in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas
McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), 185. This latter essay inspired Margaret Canovan’s
description of Habermas as an inheritor of Rousseau’s effort to “overcome human
plurality”; see note 22 above.
51. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 29.
52. Ibid., 48.
53. Ibid., 49-50.
54. Ibid., 49.
55. Ibid., 29.
56. Ibid., 98.
57. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” trans. Thomas Burger, in
Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 445. This piece, though not identified as such in
Calhoun’s book, appears to be a translation of Habermas’s new foreword to the 1990
German edition of Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1990).
58. Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” Constellations 1: 1 (April
1994): 9.
59. Habermas, “Volkssouveranitatals Verfahren. Ein normativer Begriff der Offentlich-
keit ,” in Die Moderne - ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophisch-politische Aufsatze 1977-
1992 (Leipzig: Reclam-Verlag, 1992), 207. My translation. Compare Habermas’s borrowing
of some of these same passages in “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 9-10; here,
however, Habermas does not emphasize quite so strongly the inapplicability of metaphors of
embodiment to this “dispersed and “decentered” view of democratic procedures; I have
thus chosen to quote the slightly different, earlier text.
60. Habermas, “Volkssouveranitat als Verfahren,” 207.
61. Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices” in Postmetaphysical
Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 145-146.
Emphasis added.
62. Habermas, “Concluding Remarks” in Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, 463.
63. See for example Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the
French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the
Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy” in Calhoun,
Habermas and the Public Sphere, 109-142; and Habermas’s discussion of such criticisms in
“Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 427ff.
64. Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 442.
65. For the connection between discourse ethics and public sphere theory see Habermas,
“Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 7; “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,”

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 Contesting Consensus: Patchen Markell 399
446-447. For a formulation of the procedural requirements of a rational discourse, see
Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification” in Moral
Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 88-89. There, Habermas draws out the
content of the idea that “the structure of [argumentative] communication rules out all
external or internal coercion other than the force of the better argument and thereby also
neutralizes all motives other than that of the cooperative search for truth.” This idea
produces the rules that “every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to
take part in a discourse,” that “everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever,” that
“everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse,” that “everyone
is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs,” and that “no speaker may prevented,
by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down” in the foregoing
rules. Habermas introduces these procedural rules in the course of a derivation of a stronger
moral presupposition, the “principle of universalizability,” the necessity of which has been
sharply contested. I do not address this debate over the content of discourse ethics here. See
Seyla Benhabib, “In the Shadow of Aristotle and Hegel: Communicative Ethics and Current
Controversies in Practical Philosophy” in Situating the Self, 23-67.
Note also that the model of deliberative rationality produced by discourse ethics is not
intended to serve as a theoretical blueprint for democratic institutions, but rather as an
explicit statement of the grounding of democratic legitimacy according to which institutions
might be evaluated and criticized, but which by no means fully determines the shape of those
institutions. On this point, see Habermas, “Legitimation Problems in the Modern State,”
185-6, where Rousseau is criticized precisely for confusing the “introduction of a new
principle of legitimation” with “proposals for institutionalizing a just rule.” See also
Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality,” 31-32, who stresses that discourse ethics formulates
the “general principles” and “moral intuitions” behind democratic legitimacy without
thereby directly prescribing institutional forms.
66. English translations of Habermas’s works are confusing: they render Verstiindigung
both as “understanding” and as “agreement”; Einverstiindnis is translated both as
“agreement” and as “consensus”; Konsens is always “consensus,” and in at least one case,
“rationale Willensbildung” is also rendered as “rational formation of consensus” (“Hannah
Arendt: On the Concept of Power,” 186). I will have more to say about the meaning and use
of these terms later in the paper.
67. See Habermas, “Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power,” 174-176, and in general
The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of
Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
68. Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” 716. It should be noted that Villa does
not follow Lyotard in celebrating the “heterogeneity of language games” that characterizes
postmodernity, nor does he think that Arendt is a “postmodernist” in this sense. Rather,
Villa suggests that Arendt “mourns” the loss of the integrity of the public sphere, and that
she “avoids the relativist consequences of postmodern pluralism by appealing to the Kantian
idea of a sensus communis, a common feeling for the world, which provides a
nontranscendental basis for judgments making a universal claim of validity.” (“Postmodernism
and the Public Sphere,” 719.) In my view, the difference between Habermas’s employment
of the categories of agreement and consensus and Arendt’s use of the regulative idea of a
sensus communis is much narrower than Villa thinks - not because Arendt is less an
“agonist” than Villa portrays her to be, but because Habermas’s account of the public sphere
is much more sympathetic to agonism than has hitherto been acknowledged.
69. Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994), 9.
70. Ibid., 110.
71. Ibid., 1 1 1 .
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 47.
74. Habermas uses Verstiindigungexclusively in this discussion to name the orientation of

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400 Constellations Volume 3, Number 3, 1997
the communicative actor, and the translation renders the term as “understanding” rather
than “agreement.”
75. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, volume 1, Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 293,291.
76. Ibid., 295.
77. Ibid., 287.
78. Thiscommitment to providing reasons is described as an “assumption of responsibility”
by Maeve Cooke. Habermas calls it a “warranty.” See Cooke, Language and Reason, 12.
79. Habermas. “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” 145.
80. In a recent essay on the role of consensus in Habermas’s discourse ethics, Logi
Gunnarsson has made a similar argument against such linkage between Verstindigung and
Einwerstiindnis in Habermas’s account of the normative presuppositions of argumentation.
Gunnarsson suggests that we can imagine discourses in which speakers are all oriented
toward the discursive procedures implied by the term Verstiindigung but which nevertheless
end in some way other than agreement - for example, in the voluntary “acquiescence” of
some participants to a proposal with which they do not necessarily agree but which they are
willing to support for the sake of making a collective decision, with the proviso, of course,
that the discussion of the matter in question may subsequently be reopened to allow the
underlying disagreement to be articulated. Logi Gunnarsson, “Diskurs ohne Konsens,”
Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie 42: 2 (1994): 324-5. In fact, I believe this critique does
not go far enough, for on Gunnarsson’s account, the possible alternative outcomes of
processes of Verstiindigung are still all governed by the “necessity of making a decision.” In
the public sphere, however (as opposed to the state), processes of critical discussion may be
conducted without such pressure to arrive at even a provisional agreement: in the academy,
the coffee-house and the publics made up of politically interested artists and performers, for
example, fragmentation and dissensus are not symptoms of the failure of social coordination
but merely signs of flourishing plurality. Habermas himself has hinted at such a distinction:
“legally institutionalized-will formation” and “a political system” on the one hand are
contrasted with “culturally mobilized publics” and the “peripheral networks of the political
public sphere” on the other (“Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 7, 10). It would be
worth inquiring whether the sorts of conversation that occur in each of these distinct
but related spheres are structured by different normative presuppositions - perhaps
Einwerstandnis does acquire a certain normative force within the decision-making forums of
the state which it does not, however, possess in the public sphere proper.
81. Cooke, Language and Reason, 108-109.
82. Ibid., 110.
83. Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” 10.
84. Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy,” 39.
85. Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of its Voices,” 140. See also The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. trans. Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 345, which describes modernity as exerting “structural
pressures toward the critical dissolution of guaranteed knowledge.”
86. Cf. for example Benhabib, “Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic
Legitimacy,” 31.
87. Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” 715.
88. Jurgen Habermas, Faktizitat und Geltung: Beitrage zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und
des demokratischen Rechtsstaats, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). English
translation: Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996).
89. Ibid., 678. I am quoting from William Rehg’s translation of the “Nachwort,”
published as “Postscript to Faktizitat und Geltung,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 20: 4
(1994): 147. Compare “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” 453.
90. Habermas, Faktizitat und Geltung, 680; “Postscript to Faktizitiit und Geltung,” 148.
Emphasis added.

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