Recasting Democratic Theory, 1984–1996 177
teleological view of history and the cryptonormative assumptions
built into it. Instead of the rationality of productive forces, includ-
ing natural science and technology, I trust in the productive force
of communication.^22
In a number of writings composed between 1985 and 1990,
Habermas developed this theme theoretically. He interpreted the
French Revolution as an expression of the idea that “the people”
could collectively author their destiny but asserted that this idea had
s i nc e b e c o me p r oble m at ic.^23 Habermas’s concern was how to save the
core of this idea of collective authorship under modern conditions.
He believed that the left should acknowledge that societies are not
higher-level “selves” that can know and steer themselves, whereas
the right should acknowledge the validity of the public expectation
of popular sovereignty.^24 Habermas argued that societies cannot
have one “steering center.”^25 Society cannot be grasped as a “macro-
subject,” be it that of a class (the proletariat) or a unitary conception
of “the people.”^26 As he had already written in his lectures on the
philosophical discourse of modernity, “In modern societies... there
is no equivalent for the philosophy of the subject’s model of self-
influence in general and for the Hegelian-Marxist understanding of
revolutionary action in particular.”^27 His solution to this quandary
was that popular sovereignty should be “intersubjectively dissolved”
or “proceduralized.” But what did these terms of art mean?
Proceduralized popular sovereignty, he explained, would eschew
the problem of the “unitary macrosubject” by breaking up sover-
eignty into a plurality of locations. Sovereignty therefore would have
to “find its placeless place in the interactions between” parliament
(“legally institutionalized will-formation”) and culturally mobilized
public spheres.^28 Habermas used words such as “desubstantialized,”
(^22) Interview with Hans-Peter Krüger (November 1988), in DNU, 85. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a French existentialist-Marxist philosopher.
(^23) Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” (1988), reprinted in BFN,
468.
(^24) Habermas, “Lecture XII: The Normative Content of Modernity,” in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans.Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 358, 363.
(^25) Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution: Kleine Politische Schriften VII
(Frankfurt/Main, 1990), 196 (NR hereafter); Habermas, PDM, 357.
(^26) Habermas, PDM, 361.
(^27) Ibid.
(^28) Habermas, “Nachholende Revolution linker Revisionsbedarf. Was heisst Sozial
ismus heute?” in Habermas, NR, 196; idem, BFN, 442.