Habermas, deliberation, struggles for recognition

Habermas, deliberation, struggles for recognition

Habermas' proposal for a deliberative alternative to the liberal system of rights for feminist politics is an important supplement in the pursuit of women's full freedom and equality within the liberal rights framework. He argues that women's individual liberties are forever at stake if women lack the public liberties that enable the exercise of private rights. Legitimacy and public autonomy constitute a large part of what makes the rule of law just. Modern law's neutrality toward legal persons has narrowly defined justice by disregarding difference as well as public participation in political life. While I do agree Habermas' deliberative alternative is a necessary expansion for legitimate democratic rule, it is still insufficient in its treatment of women and is perhaps an impossible ideal.

Liberal feminism as a movement stresses the equality of men and women and the unimportance of differences based on gender. It borrows from liberal political theory the idea of rights which rest on assumptions of individual autonomy and freedom and a capacity for rational thought. Many feminist theorists argue that liberalism has historically assumed males to be the individuals entitled to these rights. Women have only recently been included and accepted as fully human under the notions of liberal rights. By extending these rights to women, it is believed that educational, legal, political and economic equality for women can be achieved.

Liberal feminism has largely incorporated and uncritically accepted liberal conceptions of individual rights and argued for the extension of these rights to women, even as gender differences remain. To be sure, gains like suffrage and the removal of legal barriers and other provisions of "formal" equality under law have contributed to women's improved status. Yet formal equality is undermined by the inequalities of the market that produce and reinforce race, class, and gender inequalities. It is argued that denying or paying insufficient attention to gender differences has lead to new versions of unequal treatment for women.

Adding to this unequal treatment (through a denial of difference) has been the enactment of social-welfare policies in the areas of social, labor, and family law that attempt to remedy the unequal liberal treatment of persons. Welfare liberalism, like liberal feminist policies, has been charged with producing further discrimination for women—not through stressing a policy of sameness but through reinforcing gender stereotypes through a policy of difference. This accommodation of gender difference has enabled women to attain some measure of equality, although at the expense of reinforcing and normalizing the stereotypes that lead to discrimination in the first place. Arguably the social ills faced by women persist regardless of the existence of social-welfare policies that accommodate gender difference. Women past and present have faced employment risks due to social responsibilities (whether or not welfare compensation is received), are over-represented in lower wage brackets, are more susceptible to poverty, and perform the majority unpaid domestic work.

Following this critique, Habermas offers his deliberative alternative to traditional liberal human rights equality upheld by liberal feminism. In his view, the full realization and safeguarding of private autonomy for women can only occur if women's public autonomy as citizens of the nation is fully realized and implemented. While it is necessary to remove legal barriers that discriminate against women, simply eliminating such barriers to establish equal opportunity will not do justice to women. The emphasis on equality of opportunity has denied the gender differences that lead to unequal, inegalitarian systems. Furthermore, the social-welfare paradigm that seeks to remedy the weakness of liberalism by intervening in the private sphere to compensate for the inequalities incurred by liberal capitalism has also led to unequal treatment. What is needed is a deliberative model of democracy that enables women to substantially affect politics and the state. Habermas believes women must establish and articulate their voices in order to achieve true equality and recognition under the law. Rather than outrightly reject the framework of individual rights, liberalism must be supplemented by a proceduralist conception of rights that are to be exercised through a political public sphere. "Safeguarding the private autonomy of citizens with equal rights must go hand in hand with activating their autonomy as citizens of the nation" (Habermas 210).

Habermas rightly argues that no complement has been achieved for women's public autonomy because the liberal system of rights fails to "include a democratic understanding of the actualization of basic rights" (Habermas 210). The actualization of democratic rights entails "deliberatively filtered political communications"; Habermas advocates a reform of liberalism that designates free and open political culture and enlightened political socialization to enhance political participation for citizens. To Habermas, liberal feminism must view liberal political culture as problematic because its culture does not require continuous, intense political participation necessary for lawful democracy. Yet in my view, Habermas' liberalism does not wholly differ from liberal feminism's goals pertaining to reform of the public sphere; however his discourse theory does serve to broaden traditional notions of liberal rights by insisting on democratic participation through an autonomous public sphere.

The autonomous public sphere apart of Habermas' deliberative politics adds an important long neglected dimension to liberal rights theory: liberal political culture has never considered a lack of political participation a barrier to democracy. Habermas wants to bring back the communicative structures to civil society that was never fully realized under liberalism. A stronger political socialization, the one Habermas calls for, could potentially improve women's chances for the political socialization necessary for political participation. Women's consciousness raising groups were once such autonomous public sphere coordinated and conceptualized by feminists. The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the development of a gender consciousness, crucial to women's political recognition that Habermas' deliberative method requires. If women consider themselves to be a distinct group, they are more likely to take part in political participation. Consciousness raising groups were one such mechanism used by feminists in order to bring about a recognition of shared political interests among women.

Deliberative politics views democratic law as legitimate when it is "an instrument for the equal protection of private and public autonomy"; to have private autonomy (individual rights) one must make use of their public autonomy as enfranchised citizens engaged in lawmaking (Habermas 258). Habermas stresses the internal relation between private and public autonomy to clear the obscured state of affairs between liberal rights and welfare paternalism that have continued to leave women discriminated and marginalized. Unlike Rawls, Habermas denies that the ethical neutrality used in modern legal systems is possible; he recognizes that women and cultural minorities will continue to be identity-neutral and stripped of the social obligations that constitute their identity primarily because the constitutional state is designed to be ethically-neutral, as it is in Rawls' veil of ignorance and political liberalism. Habermas believes a moral point of view (not to be confused with fundamentalist doctrine) can be established within politics using the ideal discourse situation, the situation in which rational argumentation is to take place acceptably within a non-coercive, inclusive environment of equals. For democratic law to be legitimate, the variety of moral points of view must be incorporated and rationally evaluated in formal political public spheres as well as in informal autonomous public spheres. Yet this metaphysical proceduralist legitimacy that enables liberalism to be internally sound is no less metaphysical than Rawl's political liberalism (supposedly neutral and therefore fair and just), for Habermas states, "the citizens are denied the "moral point of view" from which they could develop and justify a political conception in joint public deliberation" (Habermas 84). It seems Habermas' ultimate goal for liberalism is in its fulfillment of its metaphysical promises for self-determination through the balancing of popular sovereignty and human rights. However much the two philosophers continually charge each other with making metaphysical assumptions while denying their own theoretical presuppositions, both theorists wish to assimilate women and multicultural societies into liberal political culture.

Activating women's public autonomy and political participation would be an important institutional norm enabling women's equal exercise of individual liberties. This condition may be combined with welfare benefits aimed to equalize the opportunity women have to exercise these individual liberties, which their social obligations eternally prevent them from fulfilling. Habermas' deliberative method is indeed an important and accurate supplement in the pursuit of women's full freedom and equality within the liberal rights framework. But it does presuppose a willingness on women's part (divided across lines of race, class, religion, and sexual orientation) to engage in a struggle for recognition. And on account of the conservative resistance and backlash against feminism, many women who would have otherwise identified as feminist no longer do.

While Habermas' deliberative method establishes a sound reform of liberalism—balancing negative liberties with positive liberties—it does not necessarily solve the problem of political recognition or the arguably problematic framework of individual rights. Habermas' deliberative method presupposes that women and cultural minorities have a responsibility to struggle for recognition without considering the possibility that these groups may not wish to struggle in the first place. The proceduralist justice Habermas calls for indeed places a moral imperative on marginalized groups to seek recognition in nation-states that have continually denied their identities and their full existence.

If Habermas sides with radical feminism's assertion that society's cultural self-understandings are in need of revision, he should be aware of the fallibility of the supplemented liberal rights framework he proposes. Should Habermas (and liberal feminism) recognize relational feminist's rejection of individualist self-conceptions, his project to broaden individual rights might well be rejected, or he might just reject relational accounts of the self as fundamentalist. Relational feminists view the self as constituted in a web of interconnected relationships of mutuality and autonomy as opposed to abstract, disconnected individualist notions of the self; value and respect are accorded to difference when interconnected relationships are taken into account. Despite forty years under liberal and radical feminism, women today still largely define themselves in relation to others—as wives, mothers, workers, etc.; arguably we all do. If women are not properly thought of first as individuals, but as units of a larger whole, and if they too identify themselves not by their individuality but by their relation to others, might different forms of moral considerability be needed in order to account for this difference? The acceptance of socially-constructed gender differences that relegate different human qualities to the masculine and to the feminine has suppressed relational accounts of morality and care practiced in large part by women. It is also important to note that relational feminism does not wish to essentialize or normalize these qualities to women as liberal feminism alleges, it simply seeks to elevate a moral framework that values difference rather than neutralize it to the detriment of women and minority cultures as liberal rights theory has.

If Habermas' deliberative alternative and ideal discourse situation fails to be realized and achieved, might the Western Enlightenment project be in need of radical reorganization rather than reform? Surely Habermas' deliberative alternative is the genuine, ideal and consistent version of liberalism needed for a feminist politics under liberal democracy. Yet his deliberative method is founded on an ideal that asserts democracy should set a politics of the public sphere outside of the state for lawful legitimacy to be maintained; this project has yet to be "actualized" and is arguably an impossible project to begin with. The feminist community knows that the issue of gender transcends questions of formal rights to social and political equality, and although Habermas' deliberative alternative supports a public sphere able to support further feminist goals, in spite of everything, it may still be insufficient to remedy women's unequal treatment, especially because it is grounded in a utopian vision of deliberative politics.

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Habermas, Jurgen. 2001. The Inclusion of the Other, Studies in Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.