Page 15 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
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10 Jürgen Habermas

                               a somewhat less volatile trajectory than in France or Germany. As
                               Habermas points out, it is an irony of British history that we associate
                               the rise of ‘political journalism’, a tradition dedicated to publicising
                               and critiquing state activity, with the Tories during their protracted
                               period of opposition and virtual exclusion from public offi ce in
                               the first half of the eighteenth century. If the Whigs brought the

                               expansive economic interests of the bourgeoisie into Parliament,
                               the Tories were pivotal in elevating the status of public opinion.
                               They worked to establish the press as a ‘fourth estate of the realm’
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                               willing to confront state authorities.  The traditional stand-offs
                               between King and Parliament were being displaced by those between
                               ‘parties’ of power and opposition. Henceforth, opposition parties, of
                               whichever colour, would claim a moral high ground ‘uncorrupted’
                               by power. Increasingly, they could also appeal to ‘public opinion’
                               as a yardstick of legitimacy in political debate. ‘Such occurrences’,
                               Habermas reminds us, ‘must not be construed prematurely as a sign
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                               of a kind of rule of public opinion.’  But they signalled a moral
                               and rhetorical evolution in the history of public opinion which

                               would later be reflected structurally in the democratic reforms of
                               the nineteenth century.
                                 Habermas’s attention to the British case is telling: that, in contrast
                               to France, the early appeal to a newly elevated ‘public opinion’ came
                               through conservative, aristocratically connected strata, resonates with
                               the formalistic conception of democracy he has pursued throughout
                               his career. At one level, Habermas cedes to the self-image of the
                               eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere the claim that bourgeois
                               publicity does more than simply reflect a narrow, historically
                               contingent class interest. However (and this is a paradox he does
                               not address adequately), Habermas shows how the specifi c class
                               interests (their opposition to economic liberalisation) of the British
                               Tories made them only half-hearted champions of public opinion.

                               The public, in their view (prefiguring twentieth-century models of
                               democratic elitism), were not suitably equipped to deliberate on
                               substantive matters of state but were, at least, well-placed to judge
                               those in power on their integrity.
                                 Habermas sketches some of the contrasts between developments
                               in the political public spheres of Britain and the Continent. Limited
                               space demands the briefest of summaries here. In Britain, a 150-year
                               struggle, beginning with the Glorious Revolution, sees the press given
                               new de facto and, eventually, constitutionally secured powers to
                               make public the proceedings of Parliament. At the same time, various









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