Page 10 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 5

sixteenth century, however, the European social landscape was
changing rapidly and capitalist trade began to assume a foundational
rather than adjunct role in economic and political life. Growing
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interdependence between an increasingly centralised state and the
merchant capitalists (the former securing the political and military
force to underpin the expansion of foreign and domestic markets,
the latter securing revenue for the former) signalled the beginnings
of a novel sense of ‘publicness’. ‘The feudal powers, the Church, the
prince, and the nobility, who were the carriers of the representative
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publicness, disintegrated in a process of polarisation’: the
Reformation paved the way for the growing privatisation of religion;
public authority assumed more bureaucratic dimensions (including a
greater separation between parliament and judiciary); and the state
budget enjoyed greater independence from the monarch’s private
holdings. The people were still merely subjects but the term ‘public’
now came to be associated with matters pertaining to an increasingly
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depersonalised state authority. The publicness and signifi cance of
the noble and aristocratic courtly cultures began to diminish.
A complex relationship between economy and state emerged during
the mercantilist phase. On the one hand, struggles over economic
production and trade saw an increasingly confident ‘private sphere’

starting to erode the omnipotence of the state. A nascent bourgeoisie
was carving out its independence and building a ‘civil society’ based
on private commerce. But, under mercantilism, of course, economic
affairs were a matter of intense public interest. The state authority
depended on the fruits of private economic initiative and the fate
of the bourgeoisie hung on the state’s tax policies, legal statutes
and military:

Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly
separated a private domain from public authority and because, on the other
hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the
confines of private domestic authority and becoming a zone of public interest,
that zone of administrative contact became ‘critical’ … in the sense that it
provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason. 6

This ‘critical reasoning’ depended on the dissemination of printed
information. For Habermas, the political, economic, cultural and
technological developments of the press played a fundamental
role: the modern conception of an active, reasoning ‘public’ – as
distinct from a collection of ‘subjects’ – is unimaginable without

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