Page 15 - Democracy and the Public Sphere
P. 15
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’
30
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
31
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
23/8/05 09:36:20
Goode 01 chaps 10 23/8/05 09:36:20
Goode 01 chaps 10