Introduction
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
Jurgen Habermas sets out to define the term "public sphere." The terms "public" and "public sphere" have a variety of meanings. However, ordinary and scientific language cannot replace these terms with more precise ones. Despite the disintegration of public opinion, society still studies it.
Public means open to all, but also relates to the state. The public is a critical judge. The public sphere is a specific public domain, set against the private. The German word "Offentlichkeit" comes from the French adjective meaning "Public". There is no seventeenth-century word for the public sphere because it did not exist before the eighteenth century. In Germany, the public sphere emerged as part of civil society, the realm of commodity exchange and labor governed by its own laws.
Notions of public and private go back further than that, however. They are Greek categories with Roman additions. In ancient Greece, the polis-oikos division existed. Political life took place in the polis; the public sphere existed as a realm of discussion and common action. Citizens were free of productive labor, but their status depended on their role as the head of the oikos, or household. The Greek public sphere was the sphere of freedom and permanence, where distinction and excellence were possible.
Since the Renaissance, this Greek model was important and influential. Medieval categories of public and private came from Roman law. But they developed only with the rise of civil society and the modern state. For more than 100 years, the foundations of this sphere have been decomposing. Publicity is still important. By understanding it, we can understand a key category of our society.
In the middle ages, the public-private contrast from Roman law was familiar, but had no standard usage. The attempt to apply this distinction to the feudal system shows that ancient and modern public and private spheres did not exist. Various higher and lower powers existed, but there was no definite way for private people to enter the public sphere. The tradition of ancient German law did have a contrast comparable to the Roman tradition: that of common and particular. This was exactly reversed in feudalism; the common man is private, exemplified by the private soldier. One cannot show sociologically that the public sphere existed in the middle ages, but a publicity of representation did exist. This was a status attribute and not a social realm. The holder of office or power represented or displayed himself. The lord and master had an "aura" that he displayed before his subjects. Lordship was represented before the people. Representation was not about political communication but about social status.
Only after modern states had destroyed feudal power, helped by the development of a capitalist economy, could court sociability develop into the eighteenth century idea of a "good" society. For the first time, public and private spheres became separate in the modern sense. Bureaucracy, the church, and the army also became public institutions, separate from the increasingly private sphere of the court.
A new social order developed with the emergence of early finance and trade capitalism. Capitalism stabilized the power structure of the society of estates and worked toward their dissolution. The instruments of this dissolution were the traffic in commodities and news created by capitalist trade. Long-distance trade led to the development of trade fairs that required horizontal economic relationships at odds with the vertical estates system. The traffic in news also developed. This traffic became public in the seventeenth century, and became revolutionary only in the mercantilist phase, which was a new stage of capitalism. Merchant companies opened up new markets and required political guarantees; the modern state developed in time with mercantilism. Increasingly sophisticated tax systems developed, along with permanent armies and administration. The public now referred to a state apparatus with a monopoly over legitimate coercion. The opening of foreign markets served the development of domestic economies. Trade in commodities causes a revolution in production.
Civil society was born as the corollary of the depersonalized state authority. Activities formerly confined to the household framework emerged into the public sphere. Economic activity became private but was oriented towards the public commodity market. The very idea of economics also changed; it ceased to relate to the household/oikos, and took its modern form.
The press took on an important role; political journals developed. The traffic in news was related to commercial need; news became a commodity. Also, new states began to use the press for state administration and intelligence. A new stratum of the bourgeois developed within the public, which included officials, doctors and lawyers. Craftsmen and shopkeepers fell in social status. The bourgeois reading public became the real carrier of the public. Their important status in civil society led to tension between town and court. States encouraged an awareness of publicness and the public sphere of civil society. The interplay between state regulation and private initiative was important in early capitalism. Broad strata of the population were affected by the regulations of mercantilist policy. Official interest in private households constituted the development of a critical sphere; administrative contact between domestic and public authority provoked the critical judgment of the public making use of its reason. The public could assume this function, as all it needed was a change in the function of the press, which had turned society into a public affair. As early as the seventeenth century, periodicals existed that mixed criticism with news. Critical reasoning made its way into the press in the eighteenth century. Private people prepared to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.
e hënë, 11 dhjetor 2006
e diel, 10 dhjetor 2006
Public sphere (2)
Social Structures of the Public Sphere
The bourgeois public sphere was the sphere of private people who have come together as a public. It claimed the public sphere against public authorities, and engaged in debate over general rules in a privatized but public sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was the public use of reason. Traditionally, power was balanced and regulated between the estates and the prince, or through a parliamentary system. This division was not possible in a commercial economy because control over private property was apolitical. The bourgeois did not rule. Their claims to power undercut existing rule. Public understanding of the public use of reason grew out of the subjectivity of the conjugal family's domestic life, the traditional source of privacy. Commodity exchange burst out of the family domain and the conjugal family was separated from the sphere of social reproduction. The polarization of state and society was repeated within society itself. A private man was head of a family and the owner of commodities; he was both property owner and human being.
The subjectivity of the conjugal family created its own public before the public assumed political functions. A precursor of the public sphere operating in the public domain emerged. It acted as a training ground for critical public reflection. The public sphere in the world of letters was similar to representative publicity; the court was an important influence. Towns were also important. Institutions such as salons and coffee houses shaped the literary public sphere. The literary public sphere was a bridge between representative and bourgeois public spheres. The state-society divide separated the public sphere from the private realm. The public sphere contained the state and court; the private sphere contained civil society as the realm of commodity exchange, and the family. The public sphere in the political realm evolved from the literary public sphere. It put the state in touch with the needs of society through public opinion.
As towns took over the functions of the medieval court, the public sphere was transformed. The institutions of the coffee house and salon strengthened the role of towns. They were centers of literary and political criticism. Coffee houses emerged in seventeenth century England, and were very popular in the eighteenth century. Writers patronized various coffee houses, but the coffee house also brought culture to the middle classes. In French salons, aristocrats, bourgeois and intellectuals met on an equal basis. Writers first had to legitimate themselves in the salon before publishing their work. German literary and "table" societies were institutions of the public sphere; people of unequal social status met there. Masonic lodges represented the secret use of enlightenment and reason. These movements needed to be kept secret because they threatened the relations of domination. Reason had to become public slowly. Secret societies eventually developed into exclusive associations that separated themselves from the public sphere. All these types of society had certain institutional criteria in common. 1)They ignored status in their social relations; all that mattered was the authority of the better argument. This idea was important despite never being realized. 2) They discussed previously unquestioned areas. 3) The public became in principle inclusive. Everyone had to be able to participate. The composition of the public changed, however.
People became able to express their opinion about art for the first time. The profession of art critic developed. Critical writing about art and literature emerged, as did critical periodical journals. Coffee houses continued the discussion begun in their pages.
The "great" public that formed in concerts and theaters was bourgeois. The concerns of the public sphere stemmed from the subjectivity of the conjugal patriarchal family. This type of family emerged from capitalist economic transformations. The family was dependent on labor and exchange, but people had autonomy as economic agents and property owners. The conjugal family's self- image collided with the real functions of the bourgeois family. It played a key role in the reproduction of both capital and social norms. The householder had autonomy in the market and authority in his house.
Ideas of conjugal freedom and love sometimes conflicted with economic realities, but they did have some objective reality. Privatized individuals saw themselves as capable of interacting in a purely human, non-economic way. This interaction occurred through letters. Letters, diaries and first person narratives were all experiments with subjectivity, oriented towards and audience. The relationship between author, work and public became intimate.
The press now supported the public that grew out of coffee houses and salons. This was the public sphere of rational-critical debate. Private people using their reason appropriated the state-governed public sphere. This process occurred through the conversion of the literary public sphere. The ideas of the privatised section of the market economy were represented with the aid of ideas developed within the private family. The public sphere began to debate critically, rather than discuss common political tasks. Questioning absolute sovereignty and state secrecy was the beginning of criticism.
A political consciousness developed in civil society that articulated the demand for general laws and eventually asserted itself as the only legitimate source of these laws. This was public opinion. Bourgeois debate occurred according to universal rules; the results of this debate claimed moral authority, because according to reason they were right. The intimate sphere was in fact caught up in market operations. As a privatised individual, the bourgeois was bourgeois and man, human being and property owner. The people making up the two types of public were different; women and dependents were excluded from the political public sphere but participated in the literary one. But in its self- understanding, the public sphere was one and indivisible. The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on a fictitious link between the roles of property owners and human beings. The interest of property owners could converge with that of the individual in general.
The bourgeois public sphere was the sphere of private people who have come together as a public. It claimed the public sphere against public authorities, and engaged in debate over general rules in a privatized but public sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was the public use of reason. Traditionally, power was balanced and regulated between the estates and the prince, or through a parliamentary system. This division was not possible in a commercial economy because control over private property was apolitical. The bourgeois did not rule. Their claims to power undercut existing rule. Public understanding of the public use of reason grew out of the subjectivity of the conjugal family's domestic life, the traditional source of privacy. Commodity exchange burst out of the family domain and the conjugal family was separated from the sphere of social reproduction. The polarization of state and society was repeated within society itself. A private man was head of a family and the owner of commodities; he was both property owner and human being.
The subjectivity of the conjugal family created its own public before the public assumed political functions. A precursor of the public sphere operating in the public domain emerged. It acted as a training ground for critical public reflection. The public sphere in the world of letters was similar to representative publicity; the court was an important influence. Towns were also important. Institutions such as salons and coffee houses shaped the literary public sphere. The literary public sphere was a bridge between representative and bourgeois public spheres. The state-society divide separated the public sphere from the private realm. The public sphere contained the state and court; the private sphere contained civil society as the realm of commodity exchange, and the family. The public sphere in the political realm evolved from the literary public sphere. It put the state in touch with the needs of society through public opinion.
As towns took over the functions of the medieval court, the public sphere was transformed. The institutions of the coffee house and salon strengthened the role of towns. They were centers of literary and political criticism. Coffee houses emerged in seventeenth century England, and were very popular in the eighteenth century. Writers patronized various coffee houses, but the coffee house also brought culture to the middle classes. In French salons, aristocrats, bourgeois and intellectuals met on an equal basis. Writers first had to legitimate themselves in the salon before publishing their work. German literary and "table" societies were institutions of the public sphere; people of unequal social status met there. Masonic lodges represented the secret use of enlightenment and reason. These movements needed to be kept secret because they threatened the relations of domination. Reason had to become public slowly. Secret societies eventually developed into exclusive associations that separated themselves from the public sphere. All these types of society had certain institutional criteria in common. 1)They ignored status in their social relations; all that mattered was the authority of the better argument. This idea was important despite never being realized. 2) They discussed previously unquestioned areas. 3) The public became in principle inclusive. Everyone had to be able to participate. The composition of the public changed, however.
People became able to express their opinion about art for the first time. The profession of art critic developed. Critical writing about art and literature emerged, as did critical periodical journals. Coffee houses continued the discussion begun in their pages.
The "great" public that formed in concerts and theaters was bourgeois. The concerns of the public sphere stemmed from the subjectivity of the conjugal patriarchal family. This type of family emerged from capitalist economic transformations. The family was dependent on labor and exchange, but people had autonomy as economic agents and property owners. The conjugal family's self- image collided with the real functions of the bourgeois family. It played a key role in the reproduction of both capital and social norms. The householder had autonomy in the market and authority in his house.
Ideas of conjugal freedom and love sometimes conflicted with economic realities, but they did have some objective reality. Privatized individuals saw themselves as capable of interacting in a purely human, non-economic way. This interaction occurred through letters. Letters, diaries and first person narratives were all experiments with subjectivity, oriented towards and audience. The relationship between author, work and public became intimate.
The press now supported the public that grew out of coffee houses and salons. This was the public sphere of rational-critical debate. Private people using their reason appropriated the state-governed public sphere. This process occurred through the conversion of the literary public sphere. The ideas of the privatised section of the market economy were represented with the aid of ideas developed within the private family. The public sphere began to debate critically, rather than discuss common political tasks. Questioning absolute sovereignty and state secrecy was the beginning of criticism.
A political consciousness developed in civil society that articulated the demand for general laws and eventually asserted itself as the only legitimate source of these laws. This was public opinion. Bourgeois debate occurred according to universal rules; the results of this debate claimed moral authority, because according to reason they were right. The intimate sphere was in fact caught up in market operations. As a privatised individual, the bourgeois was bourgeois and man, human being and property owner. The people making up the two types of public were different; women and dependents were excluded from the political public sphere but participated in the literary one. But in its self- understanding, the public sphere was one and indivisible. The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on a fictitious link between the roles of property owners and human beings. The interest of property owners could converge with that of the individual in general.
e shtunë, 9 dhjetor 2006
Public Sphere (3)
The Political Functions of the Public Sphere
The political public sphere first arose in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, when an assembly of estates turned into a modern parliament. Why this occurred earlier in Britain is uncertain. The literary public sphere became political on the continent only when the capitalist stage of production advanced more. Conflict emerged in Britain between the expansive interests of manufacturing and the restrictive interests of finance capital. In post-revolutionary Britain, this conflict involved wider strata because the capitalist mode of production extended further. The founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the elimination of censorship and the first cabinet government were important to this development. They increased the importance of capital, allowed rational-critical debate to thrive, and increased the role of parliament in state authority. The English press developed. The Tory and Whig parties were very adept at forming public opinion. Comment and criticism about the Crown and Parliament became an institution called the Fourth Estate. It transformed a public authority that was now called before the public. Parliament's response to this criticism was to make its votes and discussions secret. The first reform bill of 1834 made Parliament an organ of public opinion, not a target of its comment. English constitutional development made the continental revolutions superfluous.
Critical public opinion followed events at Westminster, regardless of whether people could vote. The minority that did not get its way in Parliament could appeal to public opinion outside it. From the eighteenth century onwards, people distinguished between the "sense of the people" and election results. By the nineteenth century, public involvement in the critical debate of political issues broke the exclusivity of Parliament.
A public arose in France, but not until the mid eighteenth century. Before the revolution, censorship, underdeveloped political journalism and a lack of estates assemblies prevented it becoming institutionalised. The revolution enshrined the right to free communication and created what had taken 100 years of slow development in Britain. In Germany, something like parliamentary life emerged only briefly after the July Revolution.
The actual function of the public sphere can be understood only in relation to a specific phase in the development of civil society, where exchange and labor were largely freed from government control. The public sphere as an element in the political realm was given the status of an organ for the self- articulation of civil society according to its needs. Its preconditions were a liberalized market and the complete privatization of civil society. It was a domain separate from public authority, but subject to mercantilist regulation. Commodity owners gained private autonomy from the expansion of this sphere. The concept of the private developed from the concept of free control over capitalist property, and is evident in the history of private law. The Continental process of codification developed a system of norms to secure an entirely private sphere. But private law remained part of state authority; it took a while for the freedom of labor and property to come in to effect.
According to civil society's idea of itself, the system of free competition was self-regulating. There could be no external intervention in the market if it were to secure everyone's well being. A society governed by the free market presented itself as free from all coercion. The free market was protected from the state by legal safeguards; intervention was dangerous and unpredictable. The bourgeois constitutional state established the political public sphere as an organ of state to ensure a link between public opinion and law. But there was a contradiction, because the law involved both will (and therefore power and violence) and reason. The rule of law aimed to abolish all domination.
The bourgeois idea of a law-governed state aimed to abolish the idea of the state as a dominating instrument. Because critical public debate is noncoercive inquiry, a legislator who listened to public opinion could claim not to be coercive. But legislative power had elements of domination in it. Public opinion wanted to be neither a check on power nor power itself. The domination of the public attempted to dissolve domination. Public debate was supposed to transform will into a reason that was a public consensus about the common interest.
The functions of the public sphere were often spelled out in legislation. Basic rights were established; they concerned critical debate, individual freedom and property transactions. Basic rights guaranteed the public and private spheres, the institutions of the public sphere (press and parties) and the foundations of autonomy (family, property). The order that "all power comes from the people" shows the character of the constitutional establishment of the political public sphere as an order of domination. Generally, constitutional states pretended to ensure the subordination of public power to a private sphere free from domination.
The public sphere of civil society depended on the principle of universal access. No group could be excluded; but the public assumed a specific form - the bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century. Education and property were the two key criteria for entry. Restriction of the franchise did not imply a restriction of the public sphere; it could be seen as the legal ratification of status acquired in the private sphere. Universal accessibility must be determined by the structure of civil society. The public sphere was safeguarded when economic criteria gave everyone an equal chance of admission. Classical political economy laid out these conditions, which were not fulfilled in the nineteenth century.
No break between man and citizen existed for the private person as long as man was the owner of property that he protected as a citizen. Class interest was the basis of public opinion, but public opinion was still close to general opinion. If it had not been, it would have become power. The dominant class developed political institutions that embodied their own abolition. The public believed itself to have an ideology. Ideology perhaps only exists from this period on. The origin of ideology was the identification of the property owner with a human being as such, and the identification of the political public sphere with the literary public sphere. The developed public sphere of civil society was bound up with complicated social preconditions. But they changed, and the contradiction of a public sphere institutionalized in a constitutional state applied. A political order was founded in order to make domination superfluous.
The political public sphere first arose in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century, when an assembly of estates turned into a modern parliament. Why this occurred earlier in Britain is uncertain. The literary public sphere became political on the continent only when the capitalist stage of production advanced more. Conflict emerged in Britain between the expansive interests of manufacturing and the restrictive interests of finance capital. In post-revolutionary Britain, this conflict involved wider strata because the capitalist mode of production extended further. The founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the elimination of censorship and the first cabinet government were important to this development. They increased the importance of capital, allowed rational-critical debate to thrive, and increased the role of parliament in state authority. The English press developed. The Tory and Whig parties were very adept at forming public opinion. Comment and criticism about the Crown and Parliament became an institution called the Fourth Estate. It transformed a public authority that was now called before the public. Parliament's response to this criticism was to make its votes and discussions secret. The first reform bill of 1834 made Parliament an organ of public opinion, not a target of its comment. English constitutional development made the continental revolutions superfluous.
Critical public opinion followed events at Westminster, regardless of whether people could vote. The minority that did not get its way in Parliament could appeal to public opinion outside it. From the eighteenth century onwards, people distinguished between the "sense of the people" and election results. By the nineteenth century, public involvement in the critical debate of political issues broke the exclusivity of Parliament.
A public arose in France, but not until the mid eighteenth century. Before the revolution, censorship, underdeveloped political journalism and a lack of estates assemblies prevented it becoming institutionalised. The revolution enshrined the right to free communication and created what had taken 100 years of slow development in Britain. In Germany, something like parliamentary life emerged only briefly after the July Revolution.
The actual function of the public sphere can be understood only in relation to a specific phase in the development of civil society, where exchange and labor were largely freed from government control. The public sphere as an element in the political realm was given the status of an organ for the self- articulation of civil society according to its needs. Its preconditions were a liberalized market and the complete privatization of civil society. It was a domain separate from public authority, but subject to mercantilist regulation. Commodity owners gained private autonomy from the expansion of this sphere. The concept of the private developed from the concept of free control over capitalist property, and is evident in the history of private law. The Continental process of codification developed a system of norms to secure an entirely private sphere. But private law remained part of state authority; it took a while for the freedom of labor and property to come in to effect.
According to civil society's idea of itself, the system of free competition was self-regulating. There could be no external intervention in the market if it were to secure everyone's well being. A society governed by the free market presented itself as free from all coercion. The free market was protected from the state by legal safeguards; intervention was dangerous and unpredictable. The bourgeois constitutional state established the political public sphere as an organ of state to ensure a link between public opinion and law. But there was a contradiction, because the law involved both will (and therefore power and violence) and reason. The rule of law aimed to abolish all domination.
The bourgeois idea of a law-governed state aimed to abolish the idea of the state as a dominating instrument. Because critical public debate is noncoercive inquiry, a legislator who listened to public opinion could claim not to be coercive. But legislative power had elements of domination in it. Public opinion wanted to be neither a check on power nor power itself. The domination of the public attempted to dissolve domination. Public debate was supposed to transform will into a reason that was a public consensus about the common interest.
The functions of the public sphere were often spelled out in legislation. Basic rights were established; they concerned critical debate, individual freedom and property transactions. Basic rights guaranteed the public and private spheres, the institutions of the public sphere (press and parties) and the foundations of autonomy (family, property). The order that "all power comes from the people" shows the character of the constitutional establishment of the political public sphere as an order of domination. Generally, constitutional states pretended to ensure the subordination of public power to a private sphere free from domination.
The public sphere of civil society depended on the principle of universal access. No group could be excluded; but the public assumed a specific form - the bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century. Education and property were the two key criteria for entry. Restriction of the franchise did not imply a restriction of the public sphere; it could be seen as the legal ratification of status acquired in the private sphere. Universal accessibility must be determined by the structure of civil society. The public sphere was safeguarded when economic criteria gave everyone an equal chance of admission. Classical political economy laid out these conditions, which were not fulfilled in the nineteenth century.
No break between man and citizen existed for the private person as long as man was the owner of property that he protected as a citizen. Class interest was the basis of public opinion, but public opinion was still close to general opinion. If it had not been, it would have become power. The dominant class developed political institutions that embodied their own abolition. The public believed itself to have an ideology. Ideology perhaps only exists from this period on. The origin of ideology was the identification of the property owner with a human being as such, and the identification of the political public sphere with the literary public sphere. The developed public sphere of civil society was bound up with complicated social preconditions. But they changed, and the contradiction of a public sphere institutionalized in a constitutional state applied. A political order was founded in order to make domination superfluous.
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