Mediation in the Lawyers' Embrace
Government strategy, dominated by steering the economy, involves the promotion of what Habermas terms 'civil privatism': rather than aiming at the normative justification of political arrangements, the state upholds its legitimacy by at once depoliticising the public sphere and simultaneously seeking to ensure that its citizens' expectations of private, essentially material, rewards are met.86 Why subjects should consent to these arrangements when the rewards are not generated hardly figures in the Government's account at all.87