Page 20 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 15

on the condition that the whole of society finds itself in the same situation
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as this class, e.g. possesses or can easily acquire money and education.

Workers, eventually seeing through the fog of the ‘free market’ their
real conditions of alienation and exploitation, would at last carry
forward the programme of a truly universal emancipation. Habermas
summarises the socialistic model of the public spheres as follows:

From the dialectic immanent in the bourgeois public sphere Marx derived the
socialist consequences of a counter-model in which the classical relationship
between the public sphere and the private was peculiarly reversed. In this
counter-model, criticism and control by the public were extended to that
portion of the private sphere of civil society which had been granted to private
persons by virtue of their power of control over the means of production …
According to this new model … [p]rivate persons came to be the private
persons of a public rather than a public of private persons … [T]he public
sphere no longer linked a society of property-owning private persons with
the state. Rather, the autonomous public … secured for itself … a sphere
of personal freedom, leisure, and freedom of movement. In this sphere, the
informal and personal interactions of human beings with one another would
have been emancipated for the first time from the constraints of social labor
… and become really ‘private’. 54

But Marx, like Hegel, laboured under a misguided historicism. Neither
foresaw the changes which both the public sphere itself and, indeed,
the critical discourses of ‘public opinion’ would undergo. As the
nineteenth century progressed, the political public sphere became
an arena whose consensually oriented self-image began to give way

to one concerned with conflict management and the division rather
than dissolution of power: compromise between interest groups and
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factions became the guiding principle. The writings of J.S. Mill and

Alexis de Tocqueville reflected this transformation: ‘With liberalism
… the bourgeois self-interpretation of the public sphere abandoned
the form of a philosophy of history in favor of a common sense
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meliorism – it became “realistic”.’
Nineteenth-century liberals observed a public sphere expanding
through the growth of press outlets and the spread of literacy and
through the rise of working class, women’s suffrage and, beyond
Europe, anti-slavery movements. They also witnessed more and
more conflict within the capitalist class itself. Marx notwithstanding,

‘Electoral reform was the topic of the nineteenth century: no longer

23/8/05 09:36:20
Goode 01 chaps 15
Goode 01 chaps 15 23/8/05 09:36:20