From Week 5: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Formation of the Public Sphere

In our discussion of Ulrich Bräker's autobiography, many of you noted his anxieties about reading and writing. His responses were not unique, and many historians have interpreted them as signs of a broader trend in European society toward greater individualism. Modern society, so the argument goes, is predicated on an idea of the individual Self as the lens, so to speak, through which people view society, perceive their world. In pre-modern societies, so the argument goes, there were no “individuals” in the modern sense, only participants in communities—be they villages, or guilds, or monasteries, or a social order, like the nobility. Modernization, therefore, is partly about the forces that created the modern, individual Self; and in that process, most accounts of modernization place great emphasis on the effects of reading and writing on the changing shape of self-awareness.

A more specific variant of this story was crafted by a German sociologist named Jürgen Habermas in a book entitled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Originally appeared in German in 1962; in English translation not until 1989; proved to be one of the most influential books on the process of “modernization”. Habermas tries to explain the emergence of a new “force” in European society and culture: public opinion. His argument, in a nutshell, goes like this:

At the center of his argument is a distinction between public and private: in the Middle Ages, he argues, there was no clear distinction between public and private; similarly, there was no clear concept of “private property” in the modern sense—as we have already seen, in our discussion of rural society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.

Those who exercised power communicated their status in a concrete, non-abstract way, by the way they dressed, by the way they carried themselves in public, by the way they spoke. Power, in this sense, was “represented”: it was put on display; indeed, it was difficult to distinguish between the “display” of power and the “exercise” of power. Exercising power meant putting it on display, and vice versa. At bottom, it was a system of communication founded on authority. This idea is related to another one we’ve encountered—the corpus mysticum or “mystical body” of the province or the nation. According to this concept, as you’ll recall, the assemblies of provincial or national estates did not “represent” anyone outside themselves; when they gathered together, the did not represent the nation, they were the nation.

Now, Habermas assumed that in this system, the “rest” of the population played an entirely passive role—like spectators at a football game. Only the people up on stage, so to speak, were “political actors”. This system, Habermas argued, had reached its apogee in the late Middle Ages, especially at the courts of France and Burgundy, and had been retreating ever since; but it was still very much alive in the eighteenth century.

As a structure of power, it was under attack from two main sources. One was capitalism, trade, and the exchange of goods: the rise of groups whose wealth and status did not depend on power over land and the people who lived on it—the traditional source of noble wealth and prestige. Capitalism, moreover, was predicated on a sharp distinction between public and private, especially public and private property. Capitalism was opposed to the layered system of ownership that characterized the old system of ownership in rural Europe, and sought to transform it, as in the process of “enclosure”; capitalism, in short, threatened the social foundation upon which the older system of power was erected. Capitalists themselves lived by their principles: unlike peasants and artisans, merchants, financiers and manufacturers—the “new” rich—lived away from the workplace; their homes became little ‘spheres of familial intimacy’.

The other source of challenge was the exchange of information: through printed media, people were for the first time able to exchange ideas in public. Once the “infrastructure” was in place—literacy, publications, the abolition of censorship laws, etc.—people could participate actively in the exchange of information in a manner that was not predicated on the old social hierarchies. If the old system had been founded on authority, the essence of this new system was rational argument. Habermas called this thing the “public sphere,” and it was fundamentally different from the communities into which the likes of Ulrich Bräker were born. People entered the public sphere actively, as individuals; the public sphere did not exist any place in particular, but everywhere people read and wrote; likewise, its power was felt everywhere that people read and wrote. It was, in short, a new source of power in European society.

Criticisms of Habermas’s Theory

So: was Habermas right about the “public sphere”? One of his favorite examples was one we've already discussed — the transformation of music and listening. Here, an art form transformed from something that was intended to display the power of the monarch and to entertain aristocracy into something that should be accessible to everyone. Similarly, he argued, bourgeois people—urban non-nobles—slowly took over the institutions of the public sphere: setting aside the newssheets of the English Civil War, the first newspapers had been vehicles for reporting on high politics and diplomacy; in the eighteenth century, people started using newspapers as vehicles for public debate and commentary—the crucial step toward the modern public sphere.

But the argument can be challenged on a couple of fronts.

1) The first has to do with his understanding of the relationship between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the state. Habermas firmly believed that the emergence of the public sphere was connected with the rise of the “bourgeoisie,” by which he meant those people of new, capitalist wealth I spoke of last time—merchants, financiers, manufacturers, slavers, and the like. He also believed that the new public sphere was ideologically opposed to the “old regime.” But his argument can be challenged on both grounds: for one thing, everyone entered the public sphere during the eighteenth century—nobles and clergymen as well as members of the “Third Estate”—and everyone had to adapt to it. The adaptation was just as hard for “bourgeois” as it was for anyone else, arguably; they were as entrenched in the system of privilege as anyone.

Further, not all speech aired in the “public sphere” of the eighteenth century was hostile to the absolutist state. As we shall see later in the term, there were parts of Europe in which the relationship between the “public sphere” and the state was adversarial — especially France during the second half of the century. But elsewhere in Europe the relationship was amicable, even mutually supportive.

2) A second criticism has to do with ‘individualization.’ Some have argued that Habermas missed the most important feature of the “public sphere”—an effect that is also discernible in the life of Ulrich Bräker: namely, what one historian (Thomas Nipperdey) called “individualization.” Through the institutions of the public sphere — books, newspapers, reading clubs, civic associations of all kinds — ordinary people like Bräker could participate actively in discussions about the great issues of life and death, issues that had previously been the preserve elites. The public sphere, in other words, broke down the monopoly of officially sanctioned speech. As a result, culture became accessible, at least in principle, to everyone.

This in turn enabled ordinary people to enter into forms of association that broke the shell of older, local, corporatist institutions — villages, craft guilds, towns, etc. All this tended to promote individualism: people entered this new “public sphere” not as members of a collectivity but as self-contained persons, who deserved to be heard (or not) on their own merits.

3) A third criticism has to do with the ‘public opinion’ and its role in social and political life: to a degree Habermas did not fully realize, the powerful began early on to mobilize public opinion as a means to influence the outcome of conflicts—to appeal to the audience, so to speak, to judge the performance of political actors “up on stage.” Here's an example from Germany: in 1731, the Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel solicited lists of grievances from the cities, towns, and villages under his rule, which would provide the basis for laws that would benefit the “general good of the fatherland.” In this instance, the prince was using “public opinion” to apply pressure on the territorial estates.

In England, especially, politicians used “mass petitions” to influence the outcome of parliamentary decision-making: there, during the period between 1660 and the Septennial Act of 1715, there were over 5,000 mass petition drives. The volume of mass petitions receded a bit after 1715 but revived again in the 1760s. Some of these mass petitions were meant to support the government; but others designed to mobilize opposition or to apply political pressure on Parliament. Now, you could argue that none of this really made social and political life more ‘participatory’: for the most part, these mass petitions were organized by elites, after all. And yet the more historians learn about how ordinary people interacted with the institutions of the public sphere, the more they recognize how actively individuals and communities used them to “reason in public” Already in the seventeenth century, common Dutch men and women began publishing their grievances on the assumption that they were more likely to get a hearing if they were first carried before a reading public.

In Habermas's model, this was not the sort of activity that ordinary peasants and townsfolk engaged in; furthermore, Habermas would not have imagined that ordinary people would try to manipulate public opinion so early, in the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. Such efforts are best documented in Germany: soon after 1700, the publication of grievances, legal briefs, and manifestoes became routine in the prosecution of countless disputes, large and small. Between 1705 and 1732, for example, lawsuits involving the council and citizenry of Frankfurt generated a veritable flood of printed court briefs, pasquils, and polemical tracts, despite the council’s best efforts to stop the tide. The explicit purpose of these publications was to connect courtroom transactions with a periodical-reading audience — to appeal cases, quite literally, to the jugement de l’univers entier (“the judgment of the entire world”), as one Swiss tract put it.