Page 14 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

INTRODUCTION 3

thesis had become familiar to British and American media studies by
the late 1970s, via a synoptic article by Habermas (1974) and some
secondary literature. Even from these texts, one could see that with his
emphasis on democracy and the role of the media, Habermas’s notion
of the public sphere actually has a good deal in common with prevailing
liberal thought in the Anglo-American traditions. At the same time, the
concept has a theoretical ambition beyond those developed within the
traditions of liberal democratic theory, of which his analysis also in part
presents itself as a critique.

THE AMBIGUITY OF HABERMAS
In this short presentation I can only hope to give a compressed view of
Habermas’s line of argument and identify some of the problematic
features of his thesis. Mats Dahlkvist (1984) develops these ideas
further in his excellent introduction to the Swedish translation, while a
similar discussion in English can be found in Keane (1984).
The ascending bourgeois classes in Western Europe, in struggling
against the powers of the absolutist state, managed to generate a new
social space or field between the state and civil society. This struggle
gained momentum especially during the eighteenth century. In contrast
to what Habermas refers to as the ‘representative publicness’ of the
medieval period, where the ruling nobility and its power were merely
displayed before the populace, this new public sphere offered the
possibility for citizens to engage in discussion on the state’s exercise of
power. In other words, private people using their own critical reason
came together to create a public. The highpoint of the bourgois public
sphere, characterized by the discussions and writings of ‘men of letters’
was reached in the early to mid-nineteenth century.
In tracing this development, Habermas emphasizes its positive
qualities yet is quick to point out a fundamental flaw in the world-view
through which the bourgeois classes came to see themselves, namely the
problem of universalism. While there were specific variations in the
evolution of the public sphere in Germany, Great Britain and France, in
general the rights of citizenship, e.g. access to the public sphere and
voting, did not include everyone, but was largely limited to property-
owners. Moreover, literacy was also at least an implicit requirement and,
given the social structure at this time, tended to coincide with the
ownership of property. In essence, Habermas points to the
contradictions between the ideal of formal equality espoused by liberal