Utopia and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Although the question of religion did not feature prominently in Jürgen Habermas’s early political theory, his more recent work has continuously addressed the topic. For instance, in one of the few references to religion in his 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, he noted the impact on the churches of the differentiation between the private sphere and public authority (Habermas 1989, 11–12).¹ Historic processes of secularization ultimately privatized religious institutions and did not require further comment. However, as recently as a 2011 compendium on The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Habermas reiterated his more recent work on the subject, arguing that religious and secular citizens “both are involved in an interaction that is constitutive for a democratic process springing from the soil of civil society and developing through the informal communication networks of the public sphere” (Habermas 2011, 27). This later interest in religion is grounded in what one commentator in that same volume cited as the urgent need to integrate religious voices in the workings of public reason in order to avoid social disharmony and to thwart potential violence (Calhoun 2011, 127). However, this chapter argues that the hermeneutic procedures Habermas develops for the public sphere cannot bear the weight that his later understanding of religion demands of them.² Such an insight validates Paul Ricoeur’s earlier argument that Habermas’s “depth hermeneutics” (Habermas 1971, 218, 226, 256) were themselves utopic in nature.