Skytte Prize to the father of deliberative democracy, Jürgen Habermas

World-famous director Lars Norén sits on a wooden chair opposite the three ‘lads’, inmates at Tidaholm Prison, all convicted of serious crimes. The room is shabby and bare. “Nobody fucking listens to us”, says one of them, a Nazi, and his comrade agrees. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite”, says the latter and glares at Norén. “What’s wrong with believing your own tribe should grow and get strong?” “But I’m listening”, Norén objects. “I want to try and understand how you think and feel”. And so the lads keep talking. Afterwards, as he is leaving the prison, Norén vomits near one of the exercise yards. The scene is included in Swedish Television’s new film adaptation of the events surrounding Norén’s play 7:3, which ended with the murder of two police officers in Malexander. Lars Norén has just engaged in what philosopher and political and social theorist Jürgen Habermas calls ‘communicative action’. Seeking conversation to understand, not necessarily to share a point of view, but discourse that is essentially different to attempting to achieve a purpose: a purpose such as convincing someone of the supremacy of an ideology, ‘selling in’ an idea or a product, pushing through a decision, or leaving a mark on someone. The point of communicative discourse is instead to explore the other or the others; the person in front of you is the purpose and the meaning. In ‘rational’ or strategic action, the purposes beyond the person become the impetus. Nowhere is the endeavour to engage in communicative action more essential than in democracy. But it has not, for a very long time, been as threatened as it is now in the polarised epoch in which we are living.

Jürgen Habermas is the recipient of the 2024 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, also known as the ‘Nobel Prize of Political Science’. He is honoured for having “constantly reminded us, theoretically and empirically, that the very lifeblood of democracy depends on human capacity and willingness to respect others by means of communicative action and on that basis to engage in critical argumentation and discourse.” Habermas argues that democracy ultimately rests on communicative, not strategic, action; the endeavour to increase reciprocal understanding of each other’s perspectives and points of view through conversation, discussion, reflection and argumentation. In so doing, the foundation is laid for the respect and consensus on which democracy, as a form of life, is dependent. In the world we live in today, where polarisation has become a keyword for describing the political condition, few messages can be more urgent than this one. Consequently, research on the practices of Habermas´s deliberative democracy – such as citizen’s panels and participatory budgeting – has flourished within political science. It is within this area that Jürgen Habermas has been the most influential in political science, where the implications are that a third understanding of what democracy ‘is’ was added to the two that were already established. He has moreover set his stamp on political science, the social sciences and the humanities in general as few other intellectuals have throughout the long postwar era. Habermas, who is still highly active at 94, has been shaped by a European tradition of thought dominated by a holistic view on knowledge about human beings and the human condition, rather than disciplinary boundaries. Faithful to that tradition, which rests on the shoulders of giants including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Norbert Elias, Habermas has therefore made critical contributions to both the understanding of the emergence of a European, enlightened public sphere and the question of what ultimately makes democracy possible and the contemporary lines of development within Europe, politically and economically. Although he is commonly described as a social theorist and philosopher, Jürgen Habermas has had monumental impact on political science.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1929 and educated at the universities in Göttingen, Zürich and Bonn, Jürgen Habermas was heavily influenced by the German Frankfurt School formed in the political turmoil of the 1920s. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse were some of the figureheads in Frankfurt in the early 1930s at the Institut für Sozialforschung (IfS, The Institute for Social Research) at Viktoria-Allee. Inspired by Marxist thought, the Frankfurt School developed a social analysis called ‘critical theory’, which indicated an analytical and critical approach to power, both in its Western, capitalist form and its communist practice as it evolved in the Soviet Union. Human self-actualisation required a different social order, one of emancipation and genuine political participation. The Nazi takeover of power led to the closure of IfS. The members of the Frankfurt School, many of them of Jewish heritage, fled Germany. Several later worked in exile in the US for many years, and the Institute re-established itself at Columbia University in New York City. The critical social analysis of the Frankfurt School thus continued to have an influence, particularly on post-WWII European intellectual development, when IfS eventually returned to Frankfurt in 1950.

Jürgen Habermas earned his PhD in 1954, but it was his dissertation for the habilitation degree (correlating in the German system to the  position of docent/professor) in 1961 that attracted attention and became a step on the path towards the eminence Habermas enjoys today. In his work Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, translated to English under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Habermas analysed how an enlightened and intellectual public sphere emerged in Western Europe starting in the 18th century.

The coffee houses and cafés that offered newspapers that could be read and discussed right then and there became important venues for this new kind of public sphere, along with the literary salons and, eventually, the homes of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the court culture, which had also shown a public face, what was new was that the public sphere evolved into one that was reasoning and argumentative, rather than performative and demonstrative, as in the past. What Habermas had identified by the early 1960s was thus how we began to talk in order to reach each other, to see into each other’s belief worlds in order to come closer together, what he much later came to call communicative action. Discourse of that kind was often connected to the growth of literacy, the ability to read texts in the press and in literature. Language – more than the image, as it is today – is the uniquely human mode of communication. In pace with the ideals of the Enlightenment and respect for the individual, the idea of democracy as a form of government emerges, where the encounter with and confrontations between different ways of evaluating and describing the world could play out in orderly, non-violent forms. For that to be possible, communicative action must be defended; the risk otherwise is that the strategic will take the upper hand. But in the capitalist 20th century, the arenas for communicative action instead diminished. Commercial mass media have (possibly) assumed their role, but mixed with myriad other purposes of a strategic nature: to persuade, to sell a narrative. Habermas concludes that the space for education and intellectualism has shrunk, a development of which he is deeply critical and alienated from. But Mats Dahlquist (now Lindberg), who wrote the foreword to the Swedish translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, polemicises against Habermas and cites the positive role of popular movements, political parties and organisations in modern society. Why not consider them an expression of the hunger for communicative action in the era of the mass society?

Jürgen Habermas succeeded Max Horkheimer as professor of philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt in 1964. He spent a long interlude from 1971 to 1983 as director of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg before returning to Frankfurt. Habermas’s perhaps best-known work is The Theory of Communicative Action (translated to Swedish in 1990). It is in this book that he develops his theory of how interpersonal communication happens according to two discrete kinds of rationality: one aimed at reaching understanding and consensus, and one where the aim is strategic and purposive. For Habermas, it is thus in communicative action that we strive for consensus and to reach each other, but that kind of ‘rationality’ has, he argues, often been bypassed in favour of the purposive. Habermas’s deep interest in and exploration of the capacity of communicative action to bridge antagonisms and clarify arguments without descending to manipulation or persuasion finally led him to develop his theory of deliberative democracy in Between Facts and Norms (1992). For political science, this meant that a third understanding of democracy challenged the two that were already established: the view of democracy as election competition between elites á la economist Joseph Schumpeter and the view of democracy as civil participation (through voting, protests, party membership or political consumption), for which scholars including Carole Pateman are prominent proponents. Here, Habermas extracted the quintessence of his arguments over many decades and posited that democracy ultimately depends precisely on communicative, not strategic, action; the endeavour to increase reciprocal understanding of each other’s perspectives and points of view by means of conversation, discussion, reflection and argumentation. In so doing, the foundation is laid for the respect and consensus on which democracy, as a form of life, is dependent.

In the world we live in today, where polarisation has become a keyword for describing the political condition, few messages can be more urgent than this one. Consequently, research on the practices of deliberative democracy – such as citizen’s panels and participatory budgeting – has flourished within political science and it is within this area that Jürgen Habermas has been the most influential.

Jürgen Habermas recently completed a magnum opus on the roots of postmetaphysical thinking, The Genealogy of Postmetaphysical Thinking, in which he analyses religious and secular beliefs. He is in addition and still an intellectual who is seen and heard in the German and European discussion of the future of capitalism, how the EU can and should evolve, and about democracy as aspiration and as practice.

Making an earnest attempt to approach the belief world of someone whose views one despises, even abhors, is among the most difficult aspects of human interaction. So many brakes are activated simultaneously. It also quickly makes us understand that the inner, mental, world, the world which is not seen but shapes what we do and how we feel, contains so much variation that it becomes frightening. The interaction with people whose belief world we do not share makes us aware of the chasm that separates us, but Habermas argues that it is the only thing that can bring us closer to consensus. Lars Norén vomits after having looked into the inner world of hatred and darkness. But who ever said that human interaction is easy, or that democracy is not hard work? There is no doubt: Jürgen Habermas’s message is challenging. We must have the courage to subject ourselves to each other, to not practice disgust, fear, contempt or dismissal, if we are to be able to agree on power, understand each other’s interests and live with our differences.

On behalf of the Prize Committee,

Li Bennich-Björkman, Johan Skytte Professor in Eloquence and Political Science

The original article in Swedish can be found here.