The depoliticization of the public sphere by Jürgen Habermas in the epistemological perspective

Abstract

This paper makes reading a key theme explored by Jürgen Habermas – The depoliticization of the public sphere – in the epistemological perspective. In this way, the depoliticization is characterized by conducting scientific practice policy with the use of technical knowledge to influence the public sphere in its political practice; the idea that positivist knowledge, reduce to a mere instrument of science and technology, incorporates in the public sphere. This is an analysis of the process of modernization and rationalization, revealing the false personification of reason in modern science and bourgeois political institutions. The progressive rationalization of modern society did penetrate the criteria of instrumental action, inevitably, also in the public sphere, in a progressive influence of technical systems on the institutional framework of society, reducing the practical problems to a solution of technical rationality. In the public sphere, political praxis dissolves into political technique. Whit the scientific conduct of practical politics, there is the emptying of the practical activity and the political discussions fall outside the scope of public discussion. The substitutions of practical for technical reasons to exclude these practical issues of the discussion from the public sphere. Thus politics, when to convert into technical task, excludes any possibility of a communicative sphere linguistically sanctioned. The paper is divided into three sections: the resumption of the transition from classical to modern political doctrine of political science (1); the scientific aspect of the policy, the political implications of scientific rationality in practical life, excluding practical issues from the public sphere (2); and the relationship between technical progress and social lifeworld (3).