Page 17 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

12 Jürgen Habermas

Stripped of Hobbesian misanthropy, opinion might then rise above
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religious prejudice. Later, Locke would explicitly elevate ‘opinion’
above prejudice but he did not claim for it a public or legislative
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role. His view, radical at the time, was that opinion could form
the basis for ‘censure’ against the weaknesses and misdemeanours
of public authority.
Habermas contends that the conjoining of ‘public’ and ‘opinion’
is at least partly an innovation of the British Tories (and oppositional
Whigs) who crafted the modern art of opposition in their appeals to
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a ‘sense of the people’ or a ‘public spirit’. Yet ‘opinion’ still evoked
immediacy and it befell the political class (who were not yet, strictly
speaking, ‘representatives’) to transform it into reason and judgment.
Later that century, Burke’s theory of ‘virtual representation’ articulated
a shift from ‘public spirit’ to ‘public opinion’. ‘The opinion of the
public that put its reason to use was no longer just opinion; it did not

arise from mere inclination but from private reflection upon public
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affairs and from their public discussion.’ Opinion was losing its
association with immediacy in favour of ‘critical refl ection’.
In revolutionary France, by contrast, Rousseau’s ‘public opinion’
evoked the instinctual bon sens of ‘the people’ against the physiocrats
who saw critical reflection as the foundation stone of loyalty. The

physiocratic view of the ‘enlightened monarch’ entailed public debate
without democracy. By contrast,

Rousseau wanted democracy without public debate … However, the
Revolution itself combined the two sundered functions of public opinion,
the critical and the legislative. The Constitution of 1791 joined the principle
of popular sovereignty with that of the parliamentary constitutional state,
which provided a constitutional guarantee for a public sphere as an element
in the political realm. The French concept of public opinion was radicalised
compared to the British notion. 42

In Germany, the precise term ‘public opinion’ (Öffentliche Meinung)
entered common parlance somewhat later. But Kant’s ‘principle of
publicity’ is critical for Habermas. Kant articulated the self-image of
a critical public sphere in terms of subordinating politics to morality.
Morality, immanent in the laws of a self-regulating civil society,
could not (contra Hobbes) be ‘demoted to the status of politically
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inconsequential ethical preference’. The public sphere, to that
extent, was to function as a bridge between the civil and political
realms. The principle of publicity underpinning the public sphere

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