Page 14 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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Excavations: The History of a Concept 9
For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere was, in principle,
shaped by the values of egalitarian dialogue. Even on the printed
page, key periodicals resorted to dialogical editorial formats in which
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letters to the editor were accorded special status. Whilst ‘truth’ was
there to be uncovered, the values of critical dialogue were meant to
erode dogmatism: discourse should remain open to the equally valid
claims of new participants and arguments; each site of discourse
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should see itself as part of a wider discursive environment. Literary
criticism adopted a new ‘conversational’ role as it sought to feed off
and back into the discussions taking place in the coffee houses and
literary societies.
The self-professed function of the political public sphere would
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be to secure the protection and integrity of the private sphere.
The bourgeoisie were adopting the mantle of the ‘universal class’ by
asserting the meritocratic ideals of the free market. The process of
conflating political (that is, bourgeois) and human (that is, universal)
emancipation, which would become the target of Marx’s critical
energies, was underway. In the self-understanding of the bourgeois
radicals, the political aspirations of their class were to be conceived
in thoroughly negative terms: they did not seek a new division of
power so much as a neutralisation of power to allow for the fl owering of
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civil society. The ideals of the political public sphere which granted
participation rights regardless of status and privilege, could, in the
eyes of the bourgeoisie, only be realised through cleansing privilege,
constraint and public interference from the sphere of civil society,
and through the development of a constitutional framework based
on freedom of contract and laissez-faire trade policies. 27
The bourgeoisie, claiming to stand as the locus of reason and
justice, took on the task of challenging state secrecy.
Historically, the polemical claim of this kind of rationality was developed, in
conjunction with the critical public debate among private people, against the
reliance of princely authority on secrets of state. Just as secrecy was supposed
to serve the maintenance of sovereignty based on voluntas, so publicity was
supposed to serve the promotion of legislation based on ratio. 28
The press, of course, were to be the prime carriers of the new ‘critical
reasoning’ in the political public sphere. Not surprisingly, Habermas
devotes much attention to developments in Britain where, bitter
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conflicts over censorship notwithstanding, the histories of press
freedom and parliamentary reform have both earlier origins and
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