Stephanie Velona on Flyvbjerg

Brent Flyvbjerg presents both Habermas and Foucault’s arguments regarding democracy and the discourse of civil society. In this article Flyvbjerg presents Habermas’s 5 requirements for ethical discourse. Flyvbjerg spells them out, but the shortened version is 1) the requirement of generality, 2) autonomy, 3) ideal role taking, 4) power neutrality and 5) transparence. Basically what Flyvbjerg says is that citizenship based on this model would be defined in terms of “taking part in public debate”. In this model Habermas is saying that everyone who is affected by a particular issue should be allowed to enter in a public debate about the issue, that there should be open discourse without one party in control.

I think Habermas has mainly constitutional elements in his argument. I do see one contradiction in his argument though; he says he wants public discourse without power yet according to Flyvbjerg for Habermas “the head of the king is still very much on, in the sense that sovereignty is a prerequisite for regulation of power by law.” However Flyvbjerg also points out that Habermas is a “top-down” thinker when it comes to procedures, he would want to tell people how they should do things instead of the people deciding how things should be done, although he would not want to control the outcome. So these elements seem a bit contradictory, but I think that he is basically a constitutionalist.

Flyvbjerg feels Habermas’s basic weakness being the “lack of agreement between ideal and reality, between intentions and their implementation”. Flyvbjerg feels that Habermas gives us a picture of what the ideal of “communicative rationality” is but he does not offer any suggestions of how to attain it. Flyvbjerg seems to suggest that Foucault’s approach that “rationalism as an ideal should never constitute a blackmail to prevent the analysis of the rationalities really at work”, as a more practical ideal.

Foucault suggests that an “analysis of society” is what will get us to understand actual political behavior. This to me seems to make perfect sense, by studying the people who belong to different civil societies we can learn how these different societies might participate politically. Not every person will fit into the typical mold of the society that they belong to; however we can get a more empirical view of particular societies and their political participation.

Habermas has a bit of a utopian approach to the way things should be and can be without the real means of getting there. Foucault seems to approach things from a more realistic perspective, trying to figure out how things are and then we can see how to make them better.