The Return of the Lifeworld

Habermas' notion of the lifeworld has a political community angle, applying to laypeople’s spontaneous activities and struggles for self-governance. This small community narrative often disappears in his grand one about... [ view full abstract ]

Habermas' notion of the lifeworld has a political community angle, applying to laypeople’s spontaneous activities and struggles for self-governance. This small community narrative often disappears in his grand one about collective action in civil society and rational deliberation in the public sphere. However, on the one side Habermas has always argued that democracy begins and ends with the exercise of self-governance from below in all the different practices of everyday life. On the other side, he insists that self-governance in, and through, reflexive action communities must neither be subordinated to a quest for collective identity in civil society, not to the exercise of hierarchical authority in the state, nor to the pursuit of self-interest in the market place. Community self-governance manifests a political process of commonalization from personalization, and vice versa. This is tied to the identification and pursuit of common concerns by laypeople networking with one another to make a difference to issue and policy formation. Community governance implies a constant questioning from below of how things are done from above. Thus, Habermas indirectly introduces a distinction between democratic politicization, linking collective identity formation in civil society to the exercise of legitimate domination in the state, and democratic problematization, coupling the quest for self-governance in the lifeworld together with the articulation, performance, delivery and evaluation of policies in, and through, systems of interactive governance. The problematization approach brings Habermas into close contact with Bennett and Segerberg’s logic of connective action, in particular that part of it which illustrates, how accelerating digitalization in fast time underlies the rise of new forms of crowd-enabled action operating at all levels from the local to the global. This fuels new life into the notion of the political lifeworld as the site for the exercise of community governance. Methodically it implies a call for the establishing an intimate relationship between qualitative narrative analysis and big data analysis for connecting community action offline and online. Empirically it indicates how lifeworld analysis must be tied to governance studies to connect the exercise of self-governance from below to the facilitation of it by a circular rather than a hierarchical authority. Self-governance operates from reciprocal acceptance and recognition of difference in the lifeworld. But this relates self-governance to the exercise of political authority by professionals who accept and recognize that the political system can only become better at governing the population, to the degree and extent that laypeople get better at governing and taking care of themselves.