Page 151 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

146 Jürgen Habermas

narrative could be justified on the grounds that they were unrecognisable

as ‘public spheres’ in the sense intended by Habermas; nor, on the
other hand, did their principles, objectives and modus operandi simply
conform to those of the bourgeois public sphere sufficiently to justify

absorbing them into the bourgeois model rather than according them
a distinctive place in the narrative.
7. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968) provides a different and complementary historical
emphasis in this sense.
8. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the
critique of actually existing democracy’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas
and the Public Sphere, p. 116.
9. Women’s suffrage began in New Zealand with women being granted
the vote in 1893. Very few other countries (Australia and Scandinavia)
followed suit before the First World War.
10. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere’, p. 113.
11. Habermas is frequently accused of fudging the distinction between
theory and practice in Structural Transformation. See, for example,
R. Holub, Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (London: Routledge,
1991), pp. 7–8. But I think a careful study of the text reveals quite
clearly that it is a story of unfulfi lled promise.
12. M. Ryan, ‘Gender and public access: women’s politics in nineteenth-
century America’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere,
pp. 262–3.
13. D. Zaret, ‘Religion, science, and printing in the public spheres in
seventeenth-century England’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the
Public Sphere, p. 215.
14. In response to Zaret’s critique, Habermas says the following: ‘I think
I have in the meantime … changed my own framework so that the
permanent autonomy of cultural developments is taken more accurately
into account. Simply, I have incorporated a bit more of Max Weber
and of changes in religious thought, moral belief systems, the impact
of the authority of science in secularized, everyday practices, even as
pacesetters of social change. So I’m more open today to integrating
some of the evidence of more recent anthropological approaches in
history.’ ‘Concluding remarks’, in Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the
Public Sphere, p. 464.
15. P. Hohendahl, ‘Critical theory, public sphere and culture: Jürgen
Habermas and his critics’, New German Critique, vol. 16 (1979).
16. Ibid., p. 104.
17. O. Negt and A. Kluge, ‘The public sphere and experience: selections’,
trans. P. Labanyi, October, no. 46 (Fall, 1988 [1972]).
18. P. Hohendahl, ‘Critical theory, public sphere and culture’, pp. 105–6.
19. Ibid., p. 105.
20. Negt and Kluge, ‘The public sphere and experience’, p. 61.
21. Ibid., p. 63.
22. Ibid., p. 65.
23. See Holub, Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere, pp. 78–105.

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