Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere

Book: Habermas and the Public sphere (1992)

Chapter: 1 - Introduction: Habermas and Public Sphere

Author: Craig Calhoun

Introduction

• The chapter explores the concepts discussed by Jurgen Habermas in his book 'The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere' published in 1962. It talks about the socio-historical conditions that gave rise to a bourgeois public sphere between 17th to 20th century and changes happened further. 
• It points to an institutional location where private individuals enaged in rational-critical (practical reason) debates on public affairs. Merit of the arguments and quantity of the participation determined decisions instead of the social status of the individuals. 
• Habermas's social theory moves from a Hegelian-Marxist orientation to a Kantian outlook. He critiques the bougeois society by highlighting its internal tensions, structural transformation and partial degeneration. 
• He also points to it's possible emancipatory potential to identify the truth despite its contradictions. 
• Early bourgeois public sphere was confined to a group of elite individuals, whose decisions were exclusionary towards the interests of the neglected. Later, it expanded to include others, consequently leading to the largescale mediator organizations and degeneration in the quality of discourse. 
• Many critiques of Habermas stressed on dissecting the issues of rational-critical debate, participation, gender, theme of massification, idea of publicity and his adoption of Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture. 

Methodological orientation:

• The work was criticised by Theodore Adorno and Max Hokheimer for not critical enough of the dangerous tendencies of an enlightened conception of public sphere, in a mass society and at the same time for its radical approach to pursue a truer democracy, beyond constitutional protections. 
• Leftists attacked it due to it's exclusion of proletarian everyday life in an advanced capitalist society and exaggerating the emancipatory potential. 
• However, Habermas's viewpoint was a counterbalance to the neglect by Marxist traditions of the progressive potential of formal democracy. 
• The public sphere engaged through public discourse (later referred by Habermas as communicative action) is an effective mode of societal integration due to its basis on reasoning and will. 
• Other modes such as money and power are non-discursive in nature and has a tendency to cultivate domination and reification. This requires a definition of 'public' rooted in its historical development. 

Development of public sphere:

• Early Greek society had a clear separation between public and private realms. The private dealt with daily necessities whereas the public symbolized freedom for autonomous citizens, which was depended on their private autonomy as the masters of household (other members were excluded from the public). 
• However, the bourgeois public sphere included private individuals (even family members) who debate on issues bearing state authority and defend the freedom of private realm from the state's domination. 
• The 'publicness' during the middle ages was a status attribute of the ruler/king. The court society later developed into 18th century salons where aristocrats played a leading role. 
• It was not the class composition of the public sphere which made it bourgeois but the society itself. 
• Rise of modern states and capitalist economy created a civil society separate from the ruler and a private realm separate from the public. It developed as a genuine domain of private autonomy which stood opposed to the state. It had institutions of socialbility and discourse loosely connected to the economy but any tranformations in the economy reflected in the transformation of civil society as well. 
• For example, the print media transmitted details of price and demand to the merchants involved in long distance trade, which later carried other informations also. It lead to widespread literacy and print media developed as a souce of current significant 'public' information. 
• Extension of mecantilism to new national territories gave rise to modern states, in which bureaucracies became agents of public administration. Supplemented wih standing armies, they became the new public authority who kept continuous contact with the trafffickers of commodities and news. 
• Hence, the new public sphere included agents of state along with citizens. Bringing relationships and organizations created for sustaining life and actions of state as interests of public discussion, it instilled a public relevance to the civil society. It institutionalized a rational-critical discourse on political matters. 

Institutionalization of public sphere:

• Institutionalization of public sphere from court societies occurred due to two reasons: 
• The family was reconstituted as an intimate sphere where ordinary life and related economic activity happened. 
• The public sphere was initially constituted in the world of letters (literary world). For example, the intimate sentimantality of private sphere became the subject of the novels.
• The use of public reason was guided by the private experiences of the conjugal family's intimate domain. The private sphere in conjugal family clearly separated the material reproduction from the intimate sphere. Hence, an audience-oriented subjectivity developed where dramas were staged for the other members of the family. This led to a false conciousness that family has become independent of the market whereas the truth was otherwise. 
• The bourgeois maintained private ownership of the property along with playing the role of a human being among others. This showed that 'family' itself critiqued the bourgeois public sphere emphasizing that humanness include something more which the economy or status could not take away. It was reflected in the literature through its portrayal of intimate private individuals who were psychologically interested in knowing 'human' through self-knowledge and empathy. 
• Literature also provided institutional bases to political sphere such as meeting places, journals and web of social relationships. Coffee houses in Britain, Salons in France and Table Societies in Germany are the best examples. 
• The status of the individual was disregarded in these circles, due to the primary interest in truth/right policy. The best rational argument is what mattered and not the identity of the speaker and it eventually led to problematization of the areas which remained unquestioned until then. 
• Also, it allowed anyone with access to books/plays/journals to be included in the sphere. It also promoted literary criticism where the lay judgement of private people interested in literature was considered.

Ideology of public sphere:

• Britain serves as a model case for Habermas as its early elimination of censorship helped in the development of public discourse. The free provision of information produced 'considered opinion'. 
• Critical debates on political issues ocurred in France only during mid-18th century but it lacked the institutional capacity until the revolution. Constitution of 1971 upheld free communication as one of the most precious rights of men. 
• The rational-critical debates in Germany was confined only to the bourgeois private gatherings as the nobility were hugely depended on courts and hence were disconnected. 
• The capitalist market conditions made the affairs of social reproduction a matter of private people's will. Educated individuals in the public sphere were treated alike owners of commodities in the market. 
• The civil rights formulated by the constitutional states pretended that its job is to ensure the subordination of public sphere to the needs of private sphere, which is supposed to be devoid of power and domination (which is far from reality). 
• Hence, the public sphere eventually became an instrument to protect the private property ownership, the point where Habermas believes the ideology originated. In the guise of providing a rational understanding of the civil society, it obscures the inherent social interests and power dynamics, thereby hindering genuine communication and social progress.  

Interpretations of public sphere:

• The conception of the public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth becomes an ideological movement and it was studied by various thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, physiocrats, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mill and Tocqueville. 
• Kant argued that enlightenment becomes possible with free public discourse. Thinking for oneself coincides with thinking aloud. Through this, conflicting private wills of the people could be brought into harmony. 
• Private economy is considered as a natural order and justice was immanent in free commerce. Here politics turns into morality as it sets a discourse ethics and ascertain the criteria of a 'legitimate political discussion'. 
• Hegel criticised that public opinion projected a common sense inherent with prejudices. 
• Marx questioned the claim of universal accessibility as property owners cannot be equated with human beings in general. Division of state and society induces an alienating division of the person into public and private. Also, the intimate private sphere of family was never free from the public tensions such as necessity of labour, patriarchal property ownership and domination. In essence, he denounced the potential of this bourgeois public sphere in ensuring harmonius human relationships. 
• Mill and Tocqueville propounded liberalism with ameliorations and protections, accepting the disharmony within capitalist civil society. It envisioned relative freedom instead of perfect freedom. 
• The internal tensions between its principled openness and class composition surfaced as the size and composition of public sphere enlarged. Public opinion faced a threat of compulsion to conformity rather than critical discourse. It faced a danger of critical thought getting separated from public opinion itself. 

Mass media and degeneration of public sphere:

• The foundations of bourgeois public sphere were undermined through a refeudalization of the society. Private people gathering together as a public to articulate the needs of the society with the state, itself became part of the private realm. This occurred due to increasing concentration of public power by the private organizations along with increasing state penetration into the private realm. State and society became interlocked. 
• The public-private distinction blurred and the inequalities embedded in the civil society surfaced as topics of discussion and action. 
• Notion of an objective general interest was replaced by a compromise among interests. Public sphere was characterized by negotiation instead of rational-critical debate. This led to the rise of welfare states as interest groups in civil society demanded services/protections from the state. 
• The world of work (large organizations) emerged as a distinct sphere separated from both public and private. The latter was reduced to the family. 
• Public sphere became a domain of apolitical sociability and passive culture consumption, departing from culture as a subject/medium of critical discussion. This is the world fashioned by mass media today which is a public sphere in appearance only. 
• However, the threshold for participation/appreciation was significantly lowered, which broadened the access. It contributed to the depoliticization of the public sphere and its impoverishment. 
• The print media which articulated political issues through critical discussion, lost its influence due to an expansion of news reading public. 
• The public sphere generated by mass media created a secondarly realm of intimacy. It provided immediacy than printed media, where concentrating on rational-critical argument became difficult. It feeds into a general sentimentality towards persons and cynicism towards institutions, curtailing subjective capacity for rational criticism of public authority. 
• This personalized politics revives representative publicity by making candidates into media stars. Public relations industry finds it easy to engineer consent among the consumers of mass culture. 
• Legislatures became the arenas for staged displays aimed at persuading the masses rather than forums for critical debate. 
• According to Habermas, the weakening of the public not only happened due to lower class entrants for being mere consumers or substandard participants but increase in the consumption of mass culture corresponding to increase in wealth, status and urbanization. 
• As the notion of general interest is lost, it produces a proliferation of products to please various tastes. 
• At this point, intellectuals began to form a different stratum as producers of culture and its critical commentaries. The public is ripped into uncritical consumers exhibiting a receptiveness of public nature and a minority of specialists who puts their reason to use nonpublicly. 

Measures to preserve public sphere:

• Media creates occasions for people to identify with public positions/personas of others. Critical discourse is replaced by public response with acclamation or withholding it. 
• States and corporates assert their legitimacy by instilling in social actors motivations that conform to the needs of the overall system dominated by the former. 
• Political parties became bureaucratic organizations aimed at motivating voters and attracting their psychological identification. No education/remedies are provided for the political immaturity of the voters. Plebiscites replaced public discourse. 
• Legislators became agents of parties due to the interpenetration of organized interest groups. The democratic broadening of the public sphere happened at the cost of internal democracy sacrificed due to representative publicity. 
• Hence, crafting a form of democratic public discourse to salvage critical reason became an urgent need. Habermas calls for internal democratization of parties, state agencies and bureaucracies along with opening up for critical publicity. Media organizations should allow more democratic access and selection. These efforts are required to preserve publicity as a source of reasoned, progressive consensus formation rather than an occasion for the manipulation of the public opinion. 
• Social integration could only be realized through communication, a process of transformation in which reason is advanced by public debate itself. 
• Habermas's proposal of intraorganizational democracy helps only to improve the representation in compromise against restoration of old public opinion based on rational-critical debate. He responds:
• The social interest groups tranformed the public sphere into an arena of vying for state action and in return the welfare state legitimizes itself by demonstrating that their policies serve the overall interest of their constituents. 
• The advanced capitalist society developed a lifeworld realm of personal relationships and communicative action whereas also formed another realm of impersonal dealings steered by money and power. It cannot be overcome through dialectics as it serves a functional significance for modern society.
• Communicative action (via institutionalized discourses like law) as an alternative to money and power for social integration and he abandons the idea of an institutionalized public sphere. 
• Public sphere becomes a contingent product of evolving communicative action rather than the latter becoming a basis for the former. This points to a more transcendental basis for democracy. 

Criticisms of bourgeois public sphere:

• Habermas fails to treat old classical bourgeois public sphere and late capitalist public sphere symmetrically. Ironically, he does not try to recover the truth from ideologically distorted writings of leading thinkers of that time. There is an overestimation of degeneration of public sphere. The public consequences of mass media need not be uniformly negative everywhere as he suggests. 
• His treatment of culture and identity ignored the role of nationalism in public sphere. Also feminist, homosexual, ethnic and youth consciousness redefined issues and identities involved in political struggle. Feminism highlighted the difficulties inherent in the public/private dichotomy Habermas proposed. It also neutralizes logic on differential identity when it deems abstraction of private identity as a qualification of publicness.
• According to Nancy Fraser, public deliberation could be understood as an occasion for clarification of interest rather than any already established public good. 
• Habermas also neglects the role of religion in the early public sphere, which is a consequence of modernity inspired rational-critical discourse. 
• Similarly, he ignored the ideology of science which ascertained the rightness of public policy over public discourse due to its opinionated nature. 
• The conception of public sphere composed of individual ideas forgot to address the influence of social movements as well. Social movements reoriented the agenda of public discourse using hegemonic powers and dominant ideology. They can be considered a subsidiary public sphere among many others, thus breaking the idea of a single public sphere for each state. 
• Public sphere can also be treated as a looser field of discursive connections, with clusters of great density of communication. 
• The plebian public sphere often reoriented to the intentions of bourgeois, thereby neglecting the interests of workers, artisans and others.

Conclusion:

• Habermas vouches for a democratic accomodation to the conditions of a mass society instead of overthrowing them. Progressive transformation of public sphere immanent in it's socio-historical conditions could now only be realized in universal characteristics of human communication. 
• The rehabilitation of formal democracy through communicative action becomes crucial in the struggle against new conservatives, not forgetting its mission to complement Marxism before. 
• In the end, it weaves economic, social-organizational, communicational, social-psychological and cultural dimensions of its problem together in a historically specific analysis.