Public Sphere

Habermas's formulation of the concept of the public sphere was intended from the beginning to be controversial. The concept was conceived as a reproach to positivist social science and more specifically to the notion that scientific polling represented the last word in researching public opinion. Habermas sought through his conceptualization of the public sphere to reintroduce notions of reason and rational discourse into discussions of public opinion, in contrast to the pollster's practice of collecting unreflective responses. This approach has become an accepted criticism of public opinion polls, even while it has not appreciably lessened the reliance of marketing experts upon polls. This lack of impact can be attributed in part to a difference in aims between polling practitioners, who are simply looking for a current snapshot of public opinion, and social theorists, who seek to explain the differences between more or less legitimate examples of public opinion.

An important feature of Habermas's analysis was his claim that the public sphere did not represent a timeless aspect of society. Rather, the bourgeois public sphere had a history: it arose early in the eighteenth century and was subject to a "refeudalization" or transformation that commenced during the middle of the nineteenth century. The "liberal model" of the public sphere was to be sharply distinguished from the ancient publics of the Greek poleis, societies where the private realm was one of necessity and the public characterized by rhetorical competition for glory—not unlike an oral "Olympics" (Arendt). The feudal "representative public-ness" that preceded the liberal model was characterized by Habermas as a form of publicness that one encounters in a medieval court—publicness as a form of display, not as a subject of dispute. The "mediatized public" that followed the decline of the liberal model can likewise be understood as a form of mediated display, with the public as an audience reading, listening, watching—but in essence consuming—the mass media performance, whether it be in the form of print, radio, or television.

The ideals of equality, inclusiveness, and rationality that lay at the heart of the liberal model rested upon the cultivation of a critical subjectivity that occurred within the intimate sphere (Intimsphäre) of the bourgeois conjugal family. The bourgeois family, which propagated an ideology of the family as a voluntary, loving community supportive of individual development, "raised bourgeois ideology above ideology itself" (Habermas, 1989, p. 48) by inculcating within its members the experience of humanity or "purely human" relations. The transference of the attitudes fostered within the private sphere to topics of public concern—first literary, then political—resulted in the rise of a critical public sphere. The subsequent collapse, beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the distinction between public and private—the "structural transformation" of Habermas's title—exposed the fictive unity of the experience of humanity central to bourgeois ideology, thereby undermining the critical function of the public sphere.

The notion of "collapse" is meant to indicate the intervention of the state into what, under the liberal model of society, were previously considered "private" matters, for example, with regard to economic regulation and social programs, as well as the adoption of quasi-public powers—through the consolidation of market power—by powerful trusts and corporations. Notions of public and private did not disappear, but they changed. They no longer denoted completely independent spheres, one—the public—of coercion, and the other—the private—of mutual exchange. The "collapse" is not meant to imply the complete dissolution of the concepts of public and private, but rather the blurring of previous boundaries as regards appropriate spheres of action, as manifest by the exercise of public power by private interests and concern over what were previously considered private economic circumstances on the part of the state. For example, the privacy of the family has become subject to regulation by child welfare services, and corporations have come to employ market power as a means of dictating public policy.

The dependence of this model of the public sphere upon the development of bourgeois civil society and in particular the bourgeois family was controversial. Although Habermas was well aware of the ideological nature of the rhetoric concerning the bourgeois family, his explanation of how the false synthesis of the abstract rights of citoyen (the citizen) and the economic necessities of homme (man, or the economic individual) "transcended" the temporal circumstances of bourgeois society by means of the concept of humanity left many unconvinced. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge made the questionable idealizations concerning the nature of the bourgeois public sphere—particularly with regard to class—the basis for their important contributions to the concept of the public sphere in their 1972 book Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Public sphere and experience). Although Negt and Kluge essentially adopted many of the premises behind the bourgeois public sphere (for example with regard to origins, history, and gender), they did question the idealization of the bourgeois public sphere as the only public sphere. The term counter public (Gegenöffentlichkeit) illustrated their claim that the public sphere as posited by the bourgeois model had always existed in a state of tension with those excluded from it. According to Negt and Kluge, these exclusions were rendered ideologically invisible by the very abstract principles of universality that previously had been idealized. Hence the growth of exclusions from public debate that Habermas depicted in the "refeudalization" of the bourgeois public sphere did not mark a departure from the underlying principles but rather an extension of their application. Rather than a singular, unified public sphere, there had always existed a variety of (counter) public spheres, each rooted in the experiences that as a whole make up the "context of living" (Lebenszusammenhang) of various individuals.

Feminist scholars also found the bourgeois model's dependence upon a rigid division between public and private questionable. They held that the bourgeois model uncritically reproduced the very same emphasis upon the "intimate sphere as schoolhouse" that had been placed upon it during the eighteenth century by those who sought to disseminate an ideal of femininity that restricted women's activities to the rearing of male citizens, thereby gendering the public as "masculine" and the private as "feminine." According to this reading, the biases exhibited by the tendency of the literary sphere to be populated by women and the political sphere by men were not simply an accidental aspect of the bourgeois public sphere—such biases were fundamental elements in its construction and maintenance. The central role gender biases played in the maintenance of the bourgeois "masculinist" public sphere was further confirmed by the connection between its collapse and the collapse of the public-private distinction—a circumstance that Habermas would later term the "colonization of the life-world." Observations such as these on the central role played by exclusions in the construction of the bourgeois public sphere have led feminist scholars such as Nancy Fraser to reject other aspects of the bourgeois public sphere: the notion that economic differences can ever be successfully bracketed; the assumption that the existence of multiple public spheres is regressive; the stricture that public discussions exclude expression of "private" interests; and the belief that a democratic public sphere requires a strict demarcation between civil society (weak publics) and public aspects of the state (strong publics).

Habermas has not been deaf to criticism and has creatively incorporated much of it into his later formulations concerning the public sphere. His work on universal pragmatics and discourse ethics during the late 1960s and 1970s prepared the ground for a less parochial model of the public sphere. Although never explicitly disavowed, the rather narrow foundations of bourgeois privacy were supplanted by the expansive, quasi-transcendental philosophical foundation of an always-already-presupposed ideal speech situation manifest within the everyday conversations that make up the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). This "conversational model" of public spheres, although subject to cooptation, was not extinguished with the passing of its bourgeois incarnation, but rather continued to reside in the communicative interstices of modern civil society. This conversational model was further modified through the attempt to integrate electronic media into the concept of the public sphere in a less negative, more productive fashion. Whereas previously the mass media was considered merely a "pseudo-public," in later work the concept of the public sphere was acknowledged to include "abstract publics" composed of individuals only brought together by means of the mass media. However, in seeking to project a more sociologically up-to-date depiction of the public sphere that fully incorporates electronic media, Habermas left himself open to accusations of alternately devaluing the normative prescriptions previously associated with the concept of the public sphere—in effect palming them off to civil society—or, in reaffirming the normative impulses that lay behind the initial formulation of the public sphere, rendering incoherent the description of the mass media as part of the public sphere.

These conceptual difficulties stem from the fact that the public sphere was initially conceived as an outgrowth of bourgeois civil society. The norms associated with the bourgeois public sphere or conversational public spheres were assumed to result from the conversations conducted within civil society. The normative status of such conversations derived from either the ideal of humanity, in the case of the bourgeois public sphere, or the ideal speech situation, in the case of conversational public spheres. In both cases, however, mass media were presumed to subvert the normative influence of such ideals by circumventing the medium of conversations in civil society through which such norms are presumed to be inculcated. As long as the conversational medium of civil society is considered the key factor in fostering the norms of the public sphere, the attempt to provide a sociologically accurate description of the public sphere that includes the mass media risks incoherence. One must either depict the public sphere as void of normative resources—contradicting thirty years of research on the subject—or exclude the mass media from the public sphere by definition. It can be argued that there are examples of both in Habermas's Between Facts and Norms (1996).

The close link that is often presumed to exist between the public sphere and civil society lies at the root of the last controversy to be explored. Many social scientists and historians have found the concept of the public sphere to be useful and have sought to adapt it to their chosen field of study. Yet Habermas has argued that the public sphere has a specific historical origin and hence cannot be applied to earlier eras without doing violence to the very concept of the public sphere. The reasoning behind this position is fairly straightforward: if the public sphere represents the conversational matrix of (at least initially) bourgeois civil society, how could the public sphere possibly antedate civil society? A public sphere that predated civil society would by necessity differ conceptually from either the bourgeois or conversational models, both of which depend upon the conversations of civil society to inculcate the proper communicative ethics. Yet it is precisely this position that some have embraced: that the public sphere needs to be reconceptualized separately from civil society, in part in order to adequately account for prior developments in communications and the growth of the marketplace for textual commodities. A "mediated" concept of the public sphere would stress how mediated communications are capable of subverting hierarchy—thereby fostering autonomy of judgment and freedom of conscience—and emphasize the historical importance of literacy, commercial activity involving textual commodities, technological innovation, and the growth of textual (or imagined) communities.