Public sphere

What does "public sphere" refer to?

Customers in a neighbourhood café raise their voices over the district's redevelopment plan. A teacher publishes a letter in a newspaper criticizing the entrance-exam system, and hundreds of people argue over it on an online forum. None of them gathered on anyone's orders, and none of them is there to make money. Each is a private individual weighing up something that concerns everyone. Such conversations add up to "public opinion", and public opinion puts pressure on governments and parliaments. The social space in which opinion forms through this kind of exchange is called the public sphere.

The German original is Öffentlichkeit, which can also be rendered "publicness" or "the public". Jürgen Habermas defined it as "the sphere of private people come together as a public". "Private people" here means people who speak as individuals, not in an office or a rank. The public sphere is distinct from the state (public authority) and from private domains such as the family or the market. It is the zone between them in which private individuals take up public matters.

Why did Habermas introduce the concept?

Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962 as his habilitation thesis, subtitled An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. He had originally been meant to habilitate under Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. But after Habermas wrote, in a research report on Marx and Marxism, that the unity of critical theory and revolutionary practice was an a priori of Marxism, Horkheimer objected that he was "furthering the business of the gentlemen in the East". Habermas left the institute in 1959 and habilitated in 1961 at Marburg under the Marxist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth, to whom the book is dedicated.

The book is a history of the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere. It was also an attempt to grasp present-day society through one of its central categories and to democratize it in the spirit of enlightened reason. It already contains the outlines of the discourse theory and the theory of communicative action that Habermas developed from the 1970s on.

How did the bourgeois public sphere arise?

According to Habermas, publicness in the Middle Ages and the early modern period was "representative publicness" (repräsentative Öffentlichkeit): the king and the nobility displayed their dignity before the people. As in the splendid ceremonies of a court, power was something to be shown, not something to be debated.

From the sixteenth century a bourgeoisie that had gained economic weight through trade and finance grew in strength. It demanded a sphere of private freedom that the absolutist state could not touch. As printing improved, periodical newspapers appeared. They carried political and economic news and entertainment, but the function Habermas valued most was another one: they let their readers criticize the monarch's rule. The opinion of the reading public increasingly became the touchstone of whether that rule succeeded or failed.

Habermas names three settings for this debate. The English coffee houses were socially somewhat broader but purely male. In the French salons women of the upper classes played an important role. In Germany the Tischgesellschaft, the table society, filled the role. He also argues that literary debate came before political debate. People read psychological novels such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela, talked about them and so learned to judge. That "literary public sphere" later served as the infrastructure for political criticism.

There were conditions for joining the public. A member had to be economically independent as a property owner and had to be educated. Within the bourgeois family, the only such "private person" was usually the father.

What did the bourgeois public sphere promise, and where did it fall short?

In principle the bourgeois public sphere stood for debate free of domination, equal and open to all. The only force that was to count in it was what Habermas called "the unforced force of the better argument": not rank or wealth but the more convincing argument wins. And whatever concerns everyone should be open to everyone's discussion. That was its promise.

But here also lay the seed of its decay. The entry conditions of property and education shut most people out of the debate carried on in coffee houses, salons and newspapers. Habermas himself wrote that such a public sphere was not merely incomplete but "rather no public sphere at all". Modern constitutions protected the conditions of the bourgeois public sphere, such as freedom of the press. But to protect private property they also protected its boundary against the "fourth estate", the proletariat. The bourgeois public sphere helped bourgeois democracy and the capitalist economy flourish, but it could not overcome the "class character" of that rule.

Yet the principle of universality pushed the public sphere beyond its own limits. The labour movement, the widening franchise and the beginnings of the welfare state broadened its social base. Habermas argues that the result was a weakening of its critical force and finally the dissolution of the bourgeois public sphere.

What is "refeudalization"?

The bourgeois public sphere depended on the separation of state and society, public and private. Habermas thinks it flourished for perhaps a hundred years, until the late nineteenth century. Afterwards, as capital and social power concentrated in a few hands, the liberal model of equal exchange between small commodity owners lost its credibility. With the rise of the "industrial society constituted as a welfare state" state and society became intertwined.

Next came the literary public sphere. As the culture industry grew, shared argument about culture withered. Mass media such as newspapers, radio and television sent messages in one direction only, and the public increasingly fell silent. Critical publicity turned into manipulative advertising. Parties, companies and interest groups used public relations to present their private interests as if they were everyone's.

Habermas called this the "refeudalization" (Refeudalisierung) of the public sphere. Just as the old monarch displayed his dignity before the people, companies and associations now display themselves through public relations. In today's terms: a company's press release becomes a news story unchanged, election campaigns are fought with image advertising rather than policy debate, and citizens become an audience watching it.

What remedy did Habermas propose?

Habermas did not conclude that because the welfare state had come with the decay of the public sphere, the welfare state should be rolled back. His first proposal was to democratize the large semi-public organizations such as parties, unions and interest groups, so that each would have a working internal public sphere and together they would form an overall one. He later dropped the second part of that idea, but not the democratization of domains beyond politics. He also held that the system of rights is complete only when rights of social and political participation are added to human and civil rights.

The book was also read as an implicit critique of the depoliticized public sphere of West Germany under Adenauer. The 1968 student movement, drawing on Habermas, demanded a repoliticization of the public sphere and open debate on all public matters.

Who was left out? Feminist and historical criticism

The book was translated into English only in 1989. The translation prompted a conference, attended by Habermas himself, whose results Craig Calhoun edited as Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992). At the centre of the criticism stood Nancy Fraser's "Rethinking the Public Sphere".

Drawing on newer historical research, Fraser argued that the bourgeois public sphere was in fact constituted by "a number of significant exclusions". Its network of philanthropic, civic, professional and cultural associations was anything but open to everyone. It was the training ground and power base of bourgeois men who were coming to see themselves as a "universal class".

Fraser also criticized the idea of "bracketing" differences of status: speaking as if differences of birth and fortune did not exist. In practice, she argued, such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups, and it would be better to unbracket inequalities and thematize them openly. Nor is it settled in advance what is private and what is a "common concern". Domestic violence was long treated as a family matter and became a public issue only after long contestation.

So instead of a single universal public sphere, Fraser thought of many. Groups pushed out of the dominant public sphere, such as women, workers and racial minorities, formed public spheres of their own. She called them "subaltern counterpublics".

Historians are divided as well. Since the 1980s German historians have largely regarded Habermas's picture of the early bourgeois public sphere of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an idealization not borne out by the sources. Some research also rejects his scheme in which the literary public sphere preceded the political one, pointing out that newspapers reported on politics from the start.

What is the proletarian public sphere?

Habermas himself knew that other public spheres existed beside the bourgeois one. He called the attempts of the mixed urban lower classes during the French Revolution to form a public sphere of their own a "plebeian public sphere" (plebejische Öffentlichkeit). In his book it remained a side issue.

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge took the question head-on in Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung (Public Sphere and Experience, 1972). Negt, a sociologist who was Habermas's assistant from 1962 to 1970 and worked for close cooperation between the Marxist left and the trade unions, and Kluge, a writer and film director who had studied with Adorno, chose the name "proletarian public sphere". As they explain, it is not a variant of the bourgeois public sphere but a completely different understanding of society as a whole, latent in history.

Put simply: the bourgeois public sphere pushes what happens in the factory and the household out as "private" and admits only opinions dressed in educated language. But workers' experience of fatigue and humiliation on the shop floor and of insecurity at home can be the starting point for understanding society as a whole. Negt and Kluge examined how contradictions arising within capitalist society give rise to counter-publics (Gegenöffentlichkeit), and they called counter-publicity a "preliminary form of the proletarian public sphere". For them the proletarian public sphere was more than a way for one class to push its interests. It was a process of transformation through which different social groups could become capable of alliance.

Today "counter-public" is widely used for alternative media, movement newspapers and spaces that gather voices the mainstream media ignore. Negt and Kluge's idea of it as a step towards a proletarian public sphere has largely faded from that usage.

How does it differ from Heidegger's "publicness"?

The same German word appears thirty-five years before Habermas in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), with almost the opposite meaning. Heidegger called the anonymous average state in which people enjoy and judge "as one does" the "they" (das Man). He called the function of the "they" that levels everything down and smooths away what is exceptional "publicness" (Öffentlichkeit).

For Heidegger publicness is where the individual loses his own self. For Habermas the public sphere is where people can oppose domination with rational argument. The same word carries distrust of mass society on one side and hope for democratic debate on the other. Heidegger's side of the story is told in the entry on Dasein.

Where is the debate going today?

In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and Between Facts and Norms (1992) Habermas placed the public sphere within his discourse theory and his theory of the democratic constitutional state. In 2022 he published A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, built from a revised 2021 essay and an interview, which discusses the influence of platform media on the democratic process. Its diagnosis is that in the age of social media anyone can speak, yet the public sphere is fragmenting. It picks up the "structural transformation" thesis of sixty years earlier.

The concept remains basic to media studies, political science and research on social movements. And as the debate between Habermas, Fraser, and Negt and Kluge shows, every discussion of the public sphere brings the question of who can speak and who goes unheard.