Page 13 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
P. 13

8 Jürgen Habermas

                               England), the salons (especially in pre-revolutionary France) and
                                                 15
                               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
                                                                     16
                               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
                                                    18
                               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
                                                             20
                               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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