Page 21 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

16 Jürgen Habermas

the principle of publicity as such … but of the enlargement of the
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public … The self-thematisation of public opinion subsided.’ It also
became important for nineteenth-century liberalism to emphasise
the dangers of public opinion and the importance of defending
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individual liberties from the tyranny of the majority. The concerns
of Mill and de Tocqueville were, Habermas points out, double-sided.
Whilst lamenting a ‘tyrannical’ aspect to public opinion, they also
criticised the excessive bureaucratisation and centralisation of state
power, which developed rapidly during the transition towards a more
intensively organised (interventionist) phase of capitalism. Whilst
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chiding them for their ‘reactionary politics’, Habermas praises their
sense of the changing relationship between the state and the political
public sphere, one far more prescient than either the bourgeois or
Marxian models:

Two tendencies dialectically related to each other indicated a breakdown of the
public sphere. While it penetrated more spheres of society, it simultaneously
lost its political function, namely: that of subjecting the affairs that it had
made public to the control of a critical public. 60

We might, then, surmise that, if nineteenth-century society saw
democracy spread more widely, then it also saw it spread more thinly.
But that glosses over some complexities. The fate of the political public
sphere under organised capitalism is characterised by Habermas as
a process of ‘refeudalisation’, where ‘the distinction “public” and
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“private” could [no longer] be usefully applied’.
The transition towards organised capitalism involved the
interlocking of state and society. ‘Society’ strengthens its grip on state
power. But instead of a convergence of interests between civil society
and the state, the coherence of civil society itself is progressively
eroded as market ‘imperfections’ become endemic crises. ‘Processes of
concentration and crisis pulled the veil of an exchange of equivalents
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off the antagonistic structure of society.’ With organised private
interest groups clamouring for the levers of state power, some
demanding protectionism and others liberalisation, the politicisation
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of civil society intensifi es. Working-class agitation also intensifi es
this politicisation and ultimately results not, as Marx anticipated,
in the dissolution of capitalism, but in expanded suffrage, Keynsian

redistributive measures, the ‘publification’ of contractual law and
collective wage-bargaining processes, and welfarism. Zones of activity
emerged that were, strictly speaking, neither private nor public:

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