Page 13 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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8 Jürgen Habermas
England), the salons (especially in pre-revolutionary France) and
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the literary societies. Of course, illiteracy and poverty excluded
much of the rural and the property-less urban populations, and the
literature that was energising the bourgeoisie specifi cally addressed
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the bourgeoisie in both form and content. The literary public
sphere, though less exclusionary than its political counterpart, was
also gendered: whilst women played an active role in the salons
that were attached to private households, their participation in
circles convened in the coffee houses and other public spaces was
heavily restricted. 17
Emerging through the literature was a novel, individualised sense
of selfhood. Richardson’s Pamela, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise and
Goethe’s Werthers Leiden exemplified a literary culture increasingly
concerned with self-disclosure. From the mid-eighteenth century
onwards, ‘there was no longer any holding back … [T]he rest of the
century revelled and felt at ease in a terrain of subjectivity barely
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known at its beginning.’ The literary public sphere located this
subjectivity in the private realms of intimacy. The bifurcation of the
public and private has a historical precedent in ancient Greece. Here,
however, the locus of humanity was the public agora itself, through
the pursuit of timeless virtues through sport and oratory, whilst the
household-slave economy confined the here-and-now of material
necessity to the privacy of the oikos. 19
The bourgeois public sphere imagined itself to comprise private
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people coming together as a public. Power and domination were
anathema to a sacrosanct selfhood: the public sphere wanted to wrest
culture and its interpretation from authority structures corrupted by
public power. This project idealististically evoked an erasure of status:
as art and literature were commodified, they would assume intrinsic
worth and cease to function as strategic tools of the old powers; and
they would become, in principle, accessible to all. 21
The bourgeois public’s critical public debate took place in principle without
regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal
rules. These rules, because they remained strictly external to the individuals
as such, secured space for the development of these individuals’ interiority
by literary means. These rules, because universally valid, secured a space
for the individuated person; because they were objective, they secured a
space for what was most subjective; because they were abstract, for what
was most concrete. 22
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