Public Sphere and Communicative Rationality: Interrogating Habermas's Eurocentrism

Abstract

Habermas's critical theory of society and modernity, which he developed by reconstructing the concepts of public sphere/civil society and rationality, suffers from some of the same weaknesses attributed to the structural-functionalist modernization theory. Both theories lean solely on European historical experience despite their proponents' claim for “universalism.” The theory of communicative action, wherein Habermas has now implanted the public sphere, is the product of merging philosophy of history (or historical hermeneutics) and empirical social science—an attempt “to free historical materialism from its philosophical ballast,” according to Habermas, and “less a promise than a conjecture.” This monograph calls for a revision or “glocalization” of Habermas's theory to remove its lingering traces of “universalism” that promote domination through globalization—a euphemism for Eurocentric hegemony as we move from theory to practice. The aporetic presumptions of Habermasian theory do not necessarily match the ontological, epistemological, and historical reservoir of the non-West. Therefore, the project of provincializing “Europe” is in order.