Page 87 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

The public sphere
For Habermas, the Enlightenment had been sustained by quite
distinctive institutional forms. Their novelty had inspired his first
major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
which attempted to explain the socio-historical emergence, during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of a middle-class public
opinion, relatively independent of the absolute monarchy. This
‘bourgeois public sphere’ was ‘the sphere of private people come
together as a public’, a public made up of formally free and equal,
rational individuals. These bourgeois would-be citizens,
Habermas wrote, ‘soon claimed the public sphere . . . against the
public authorities themselves... The medium of political
confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent:
people’s use of their reason’ (Habermas, 1989, p. 27). The key
institutions included the salons in France, the learned and literary
societies in Germany and the coffee houses in England. Habermas
traced the historical evolution of the institutions of public opinion
through to their apparent decline in the modern social-welfare
state, where state and society penetrate each other, thus produc-
ing an apparent ‘refeudalization’ (p. 231) of society. The collapse
of the liberal public sphere has made room for staged and manip-
ulative publicity of the kind registered by Adorno and
Horkheimer, he observed, but the state still clings to the mandate
of a critical public sphere (p. 232).
The problem for Habermas therefore became not the whole-
sale refusal enacted by the first generation of critical theorists, but
rather how to create new forms of critical public opinion within
the institutional contexts already established by an increasingly
‘organised’ capitalism. In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas distin-
guished between society viewed as ‘system’ and as ‘life-world’.
The first referred to the sphere of the economy and the state, of
money and power, which functions through the logic of instru-
mental reason; the second to the world of everyday experience,
social discourse and cultural values, science, politics and art.
Habermas believed that in the life-world a realm of ‘undistorted
communication’ between free and equal citizens could establish
values able to counteract the dominative tendencies of the system.
But the life-world is increasingly subject to ‘colonisation’ by the

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