For Habermas, the 'public sphere' was a social forum that allowed people to debate — whether it was the town hall or the coffee house, maintaining a space for public debate was an essential part of democracy. Habermas’s controversial work examines the erosion of these spaces within consumer society and calls for new thinking about democracy today.
Drawing on Habermas’s early and more recent writings, this book examines the ‘public sphere’ in its full complexity, outlining its relevance to today’s media and culture. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
For Habermas, the 'public sphere' was a social forum that allowed people to debate — whether it was the town hall or the coffee house, maintaining a space for public debate was an essential part of democracy. Habermas’s controversial work examines the erosion of these spaces within consumer society and calls for new thinking about democracy today.
Drawing on Habermas’s early and more recent writings, this book examines the ‘public sphere’ in its full complexity, outlining its relevance to today’s media and culture. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
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Overview
For Habermas, the 'public sphere' was a social forum that allowed people to debate — whether it was the town hall or the coffee house, maintaining a space for public debate was an essential part of democracy. Habermas’s controversial work examines the erosion of these spaces within consumer society and calls for new thinking about democracy today.
Drawing on Habermas’s early and more recent writings, this book examines the ‘public sphere’ in its full complexity, outlining its relevance to today’s media and culture. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745320885 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 11/29/2005 |
| Series: | Modern European Thinkers Series |
| Pages: | 174 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Excavations: The History of a Concept
In this book I hope to make the case for seeing The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as a work that still resonates with some of the urgent questions facing the 'democratic project' today. In privileging this work and the category 'public sphere', I'm suggesting that if we want to enrich our grasp of the problems facing the democratic imagination, we would do well to read Habermas's later works through the lens of Structural Transformation and its key concerns. Structural Transformation invites us to reflect closely on the nature of public deliberation and the democratic process at a time when the rhetoric of 'citizenship' has become such common currency – especially, though not exclusively, in Western democracies – against a backdrop of striking developments: increasingly sophisticated political marketing techniques; changes in media culture that implicate the very institutions which aspire to connect citizens with the powerful; an ascendant politics of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism which can sometimes displace and sometimes appropriate the discourse of citizenship; and patterns of political behaviour, such as staggeringly low voting rates, which highlight widespread disaffection with the official institutions of democracy, especially in the younger generations.
A historicist reading of Structural Transformation could read off the present and future in terms of an unfolding historical dialectic: either a negative dialectic in which the potential for a truly democratic and rational public sphere has been irreversibly squandered, or a positive dialectic that gestures towards a radical–democratic endgame in which the rationality of the undemocratic bourgeois public sphere and the democracy of the irrational mass society might finally be reconciled. But what I propose instead is to read Structural Transformation as the sort of encounter between theory and history that offers a useful counterweight to the drift into abstraction characteristic of more recent critical theory. It is this kind of historically grounded attention to the evolution of discourses, practices and institutions that, I suggest, does more to energise and stimulate our thinking about democracy than either a philosophically abstract preoccupation with the relationship between law, morality and reason, or an institutionally abstract preoccupation with constitutional norms and human rights, both of which have been at the centre of the Habermasian project in recent years.
The point of Structural Transformation is not to provide a history to feed our nostalgic aspirations, and Habermas himself has never idealised the eighteenth-century public sphere to quite the degree that his critics have charged. Instead, it offers us a frame of reference which may help us to reflect on both the points of connection and the discontinuities between the past and our current predicament. Though as historiography it may not always pass muster with professional historians, scholars of social and political thought can find more in Structural Transformation than in any of Habermas's more recent works to expose the slippages between ambiguous, complex histories and virtuous ideals or grand theoretical systems. We start, then, with a survey of the main themes of Structural Transformation.
THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE
Under feudalism, Habermas reports, the 'public realm' existed not as a sphere of interaction and debate but merely of representation: aristocracy and nobility played out the symbolic dramas of majesty and highness before their subjects. To talk of a public realm is even misleading insofar as 'publicness', as a status attribute or performative mode, was more significant than spatial location. The links between this 'representative publicness' and today's mass-mediated spectacles of public life are thin: it was simply staged performance before the people, not on behalf of a public. In fact, there was no 'public' as such, only public display. A distinct public realm and its corollary, a distinct private sphere, were all but absent. However, emergent forms of trade and finance capitalism – Habermas here focuses on Britain, France and Germany – and the eventual establishment of a 'civil society' underpinned by the ideology of 'private' autonomy, would eventually transform 'publicness' into something very different.
Long before feudalism was in its death throes, the increasing geographical reach and regularity of early capitalist trading set in train an expanding network of communications, primarily trade newsletters. To begin with, the newsletters circulated among closed networks of merchants. This was not yet the rise of a print-based public culture. 'Publicness' was still the preserve of the feudal powers and it remained primarily oral, theatrical and immediate. By the sixteenth century, however, the European social landscape was changing rapidly and capitalist trade began to assume a foundational rather than adjunct role in economic and political life. Growing interdependence between an increasingly centralised state and the merchant capitalists (the former securing the political and military force to underpin the expansion of foreign and domestic markets, the latter securing revenue for the former) signalled the beginnings of a novel sense of 'publicness'. 'The feudal powers, the Church, the prince, and the nobility, who were the carriers of the representative publicness, disintegrated in a process of polarisation': the Reformation paved the way for the growing privatisation of religion; public authority assumed more bureaucratic dimensions (including a greater separation between parliament and judiciary); and the state budget enjoyed greater independence from the monarch's private holdings. The people were still merely subjects but the term 'public' now came to be associated with matters pertaining to an increasingly depersonalised state authority. The publicness and significance of the noble and aristocratic courtly cultures began to diminish.
A complex relationship between economy and state emerged during the mercantilist phase. On the one hand, struggles over economic production and trade saw an increasingly confident 'private sphere' starting to erode the omnipotence of the state. A nascent bourgeoisie was carving out its independence and building a 'civil society' based on private commerce. But, under mercantilism, of course, economic affairs were a matter of intense public interest. The state authority depended on the fruits of private economic initiative and the fate of the bourgeoisie hung on the state's tax policies, legal statutes and military:
Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain from public authority and because, on the other hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the confines of private domestic authority and becoming a zone of public interest, that zone of administrative contact became 'critical' ... in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason.
This 'critical reasoning' depended on the dissemination of printed information. For Habermas, the political, economic, cultural and technological developments of the press played a fundamental role: the modern conception of an active, reasoning 'public' – as distinct from a collection of 'subjects' – is unimaginable without them. The press emerged as an outgrowth of the increasing traffic in merchant newsletters. Already, under feudalism, these newsletters had 'unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve'.
Habermas paints the second half of the seventeenth century as a critical period during which something approaching a publicly accessible 'press' emerged, feeding off and filtering the news conveyed in the private correspondences of the merchant capitalists. This marked the emergence of regularised printed communication addressed to unspecified recipients. Of course, the 'audience' was largely confined to bourgeois and intellectual strata. But crucially, the press departed from the principle of immediacy: a piece of news was no longer a private affair, something of interest only to those whom it directly implicated, but was part of a larger communicative environment premised on a putative general interest. This 'general interest' was more than simply a novel ideological construct: it also reflected the very material forces which progressively eroded localised economic self-sufficiency and integrated the bourgeoisie (and, of course, their workers who were not generally privy to the new communication flows) into regional and national networks of interconnection and interdependency. They became expanded 'communities of fate', in other words, or, to use Benedict Anderson's well-known formulation, 'imagined communities'. This period saw the emergence of what were called 'political journals' (produced with increasing regularity until, eventually, daily publication became the norm) containing information on taxes, commodity prices, wars, foreign trade and the like.
For Habermas, two supply-side drivers were critically important for the growth of the press. First, news had become a commodity and there were economies of scale to be harnessed by producing news for expanded readerships. Second, state authorities rapidly cottoned on to the power of the printed word. As power migrated from the localism of the estates to a centralising state, print offered an efficient means of communicating decrees, proclamations, royal news and other symbols of authority across the territory. But the effectiveness of this propaganda tool and the extent to which the medium provided a new forum for the old functions of 'representative publicness', ran up against obvious limits. On the demand side, there was a fundamental tension between the self-image of an emergent 'reasoning' public and the principle of rule by decree. In mercantilism the state had set in train a 'peculiar ambivalence of public regulation and private initiative'. In that liminal zone between the state and what would later emerge as 'civil society', the press did more to kindle than to smother the flames of bourgeois revolt.
By the early eighteenth century it had become commonplace for the pages of journals and periodicals to be taken up not simply with economic information and state propaganda, but with critical, openly opinionated articles: 'In the guise of so-called learned articles, critical reasoning made its way into the daily press.' The press was implicitly critical because its operations challenged the interpretative duopoly of church and state. In the early phases such articles were less likely to attack the activities of state head-on than to plough an impressively independent line on literary, philosophical or pedagogic matters. (The early Spectator, for example, focused on the discussion of literature, morality and etiquette.) For this reason, Habermas identifies a bourgeois public sphere in the 'world of letters' as the precursor to a more directly political public sphere.
The precursory role that Habermas assigns to the literary public sphere suffers a certain ambiguity. After all, the literary public sphere Habermas portrays is, ostensibly, an eighteenth-century phenomenon, whilst the previous century is characterised by the emergence of a press more concerned with 'news' and information. In fact, Structural Transformation appears to assign the literary public sphere a precursory role on three levels. First, the seventeenth-century press did not, by and large, reflect the 'critical reasoning' Habermas reads into the eighteenth-century public sphere. Pages taken up with commodity prices, taxes, state announcements and so forth did not, of themselves, construct a 'reasoning public' critically reflecting upon matters of state. Second, to the extent that a political public sphere is linked to active struggles over the levers of state power, the eighteenth-century literary public sphere prefigures its political counterpart, at least insofar as the formal enfranchisement of the bourgeoisie serves as a yardstick. Finally, there is a synchronic consideration: in the idealistic self-image of the bourgeois public sphere, the literary public sphere is constituted as a 'pre-political' realm of self-clarification, a zone of freedom in which a putative 'humanity' or 'authentic' subjectivity could flourish, whose protection must become the raison d'être of a 'just' polity.
The literary public sphere spread beyond the pages of the printed press and beyond the restricted strata of the pedagogues and philosophes. 'Critical reasoning' occupied the proliferating coffee houses (especially in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England), the salons (especially in pre-revolutionary France) and the literary societies. Of course, illiteracy and poverty excluded much of the rural and the property-less urban populations, and the literature that was energising the bourgeoisie specifically addressed the bourgeoisie in both form and content. The literary public sphere, though less exclusionary than its political counterpart, was also gendered: whilst women played an active role in the salons that were attached to private households, their participation in circles convened in the coffee houses and other public spaces was heavily restricted.
Emerging through the literature was a novel, individualised sense of selfhood. Richardson's Pamela, Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise and Goethe's Werthers Leiden exemplified a literary culture increasingly concerned with self-disclosure. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, 'there was no longer any holding back ... [T]he rest of the century revelled and felt at ease in a terrain of subjectivity barely known at its beginning.' The literary public sphere located this subjectivity in the private realms of intimacy. The bifurcation of the public and private has a historical precedent in ancient Greece. Here, however, the locus of humanity was the public agora itself, through the pursuit of timeless virtues through sport and oratory, whilst the household-slave economy confined the here-and-now of material necessity to the privacy of the oikos.
The bourgeois public sphere imagined itself to comprise private people coming together as a public. Power and domination were anathema to a sacrosanct selfhood: the public sphere wanted to wrest culture and its interpretation from authority structures corrupted by public power. This project idealististically evoked an erasure of status: as art and literature were commodified, they would assume intrinsic worth and cease to function as strategic tools of the old powers; and they would become, in principle, accessible to all.
The bourgeois public's critical public debate took place in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal rules. These rules, because they remained strictly external to the individuals as such, secured space for the development of these individuals' interiority by literary means. These rules, because universally valid, secured a space for the individuated person; because they were objective, they secured a space for what was most subjective; because they were abstract, for what was most concrete.
For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere was, in principle, shaped by the values of egalitarian dialogue. Even on the printed page, key periodicals resorted to dialogical editorial formats in which letters to the editor were accorded special status. Whilst 'truth' was there to be uncovered, the values of critical dialogue were meant to erode dogmatism: discourse should remain open to the equally valid claims of new participants and arguments; each site of discourse should see itself as part of a wider discursive environment. Literary criticism adopted a new 'conversational' role as it sought to feed off and back into the discussions taking place in the coffee houses and literary societies.
The self-professed function of the political public sphere would be to secure the protection and integrity of the private sphere. The bourgeoisie were adopting the mantle of the 'universal class' by asserting the meritocratic ideals of the free market. The process of conflating political (that is, bourgeois) and human (that is, universal) emancipation, which would become the target of Marx's critical energies, was underway. In the self-understanding of the bourgeois radicals, the political aspirations of their class were to be conceived in thoroughly negative terms: they did not seek a new division of power so much as a neutralisation of power to allow for the flowering of civil society. The ideals of the political public sphere which granted participation rights regardless of status and privilege, could, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, only be realised through cleansing privilege, constraint and public interference from the sphere of civil society, and through the development of a constitutional framework based on freedom of contract and laissez-faire trade policies.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jürgen Habermas"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Luke Goode.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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