Page 19 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

14 Jürgen Habermas

focus on those dynamics which, rather than bringing history into line
with the Kantian ideal, served only to transform both the institutional
contours and self-image of the political public sphere.

THE FALL OF THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE

For Hegel, the intractable problems of privilege and conflict in civil

society destroyed the universalism and permanence to which ‘public
opinion’ could lay claim in the Kantian system. With Hegel, public
opinion ‘no longer retained a basis of unity and truth; it degenerated
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to the level of a subjective opining of the many’. Politics could
not be subsumed by an abstract ‘universal morality’. The state is
compelled to intervene in an unruly civil society. Yet, in standing
above public opinion, the state could in principle unify civil society:
it could become an embodiment of the Zeitgeist in which a populace

craving spirit, rather than abstract morality, would find meaning. In
the Hegelian system, then, public opinion is paradoxically respected
and despised as it both refl ects and threatens to dissolve a national
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ethos. For Habermas, Hegel demotes the public sphere to a ‘means
of education’, motivation and assembly for an otherwise entropic
public opinion. 51
Marx, like Hegel, saw civil society characterised by intractable
contradictions rather than a latent harmony of interests but, as is
well known, this ultimately led him down a very different path.
Whilst the universal ideals of the bourgeois revolutions served to
conceal their partial realisation, Hegel’s glorification of the Prussian

estates-based constitution looked to Marx like a futile attempt to
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rewind the emancipatory energies unleashed by the revolutions.
For Hegel, the bourgeois public sphere had, in assuming legislative
functions, become too public. For Marx, by contrast, it was not public
enough. Marx’s statement on the German bourgeoisie in 1844 neatly
encapsulates this perspective:

It is not radical revolution or universal human emancipation which is a
utopian dream for Germany; it is the partial, merely political revolution,
the revolution which leaves the pillars of the building standing. What is the
basis of a partial and merely political revolution? Its basis is the fact that one
part of civil society emancipates itself and attains universal domination, that
one particular class undertakes from its particular situation the universal
emancipation of society. This class liberates the whole of society, but only

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