I want to pick up on this earlier post on 'the fear of the masses' in liberal democracy; a fear about the various passions and feelings that condition the thoughts and actions of a people, or a multitude. I'm relying on Warren Montag's 'The Pressure of the Street: Habermas's Fear of the Masses' to explore this political problematic of a politics of fear; one that finds classical expression in the texts of John Stuart Mill, Mathew Arnold and Friedrich Hayek. Do we not live with a politics of fear today in relation to the war on terror: a politics based on "'animating" the anxieties of the people of liberal democracy about the Muslim street?

In the earlier post it was stated that for the Habermas of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere it was the great liberals of the nineteenth-century who accurately diagnosed the fatal malady of the liberal public sphere. It was not Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche. Warren Montag says that Habermas' argument for this claim is that the liberal tradition's strength lay in the fact that, for it, the capitalist market and capitalist social relations were an absolute horizon, beyond which it was not merely undesirable, but impossible, to go. Consequently, the liberals in the 19th century were compelled to look within rather than beyond the public sphere for any explanation of its failures. For Habermas, Montag says:

...it was such liberals as Mill and Tocqueville who noted the tendency of the public sphere per se to degenerate from a sphere of rational-critical debate, the model of which depended upon the ability of individuals to abstract themselves from their material circumstances and allow reason alone to decide their controversies, into an arena in which competing interest groups struggled for power. The general good was lost and the tyranny of the majority, bound not by reason but by interest, over minorities became an ever present danger. In the period after World War Two, such a development becomes increasingly likely, even inevitable, with the universalization of mass media, the colonization of thought and imagination by advertising, by "publicity" in the degraded sense. Rational-critical debate is reduced to a distant memory as majorities are shaped by the means of communication. Criticism becomes pseudo-criticism, revolt merely the simulacrum of great challenges to established orders past, more likely than not to produce an even more totally administered world.

What does 'the pressure from the street' refer to in late liberal capitalist society? I just code in class conflict and read it as working class, and its use of demonstrations and strikes as political tools to further its class interests.

Montag is much more sophisticated. He reads 'the pressure of the street' in terms of the rhetorical figure of a metonymy to determine the meaning of 'the street' in the Public Sphere text. He says that the street is not an alternative public sphere; it is precisely not a sphere of rational critique or even discussion at all. The street is the sphere of action:

The street moves or produces effects through the force of its weight, its mass.... The street is outside the centers of discussion, exchange and deliberation. In fact, it is the outside of rational exchange in every sense: the exchange of ideas which resembles in so many respects the exchange of commodities (competition, progressive optimalization). Hence we have the opposition between the public sphere and the street, as an opposition between communicative action and corporeal action, reason and force.

The reproduction of capitalism as an economic system depended upon market forces and the force of persuasion in the form of ideology. There can be no genuine competition between arguments and ideas, because between ideas there are relations of force, in that they are embodied in the broader relationship of forces in a society characterized by a perpetual, if latent, civil war that renders some dominant and others subordinate. The effects of effects of coercion and discipline in workplaces and communities can be seen minds and bodies. The force of reason exerts no pressure or has no effect at all, except insofar as it rests on real, physical force.

Is this not a recovery of Machiavelli; the Machiavelli who thinks about politics from the vantage point of crisis and the event. In the texts of this Machiavelli, says Montag, there is no reference to the pre-given natural hierarchy of command and obedience grounded in the family; no notion of the state of nature as an empty stage, a free space where individual actors, originally separate and equal, determined by their will alone, arrive at a binding contract that furnished the principles that regulate social reality. Montag says that this:

Machiavelli turns away from transcendental origins; he is a thinker of the present, of the singular conjuncture in which relations of domination and subordination are determined neither by nature nor contract, but by always temporary configurations of power relations; it is here that the freedom of virtu encounters fortuna. Social prosperity depends on nothing other than the correct balance of forces.