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
                                                                         23
                                  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
                                                                                  24
                                  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
                                                                                         25
                                  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
                                            26
                                  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
                                                                      29
                                  conflicts over censorship notwithstanding,  the histories of press

                                  freedom and parliamentary reform have both earlier origins and







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