Page 22 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Excavations: The History of a Concept 17

the ‘public sector’ related in a privatised manner towards ‘clients’
(individuals and corporations) and employees whilst operating under
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the banner of a ‘public interest’.
Against the bourgeois ideal, the very term ‘public interest’ was now

assumed to reflect compromise and negotiation between antagonistic
private interests. However, the point is not simply that the public
sphere would no longer preoccupy itself primarily with uncovering
a ‘natural’ coincidence between private and universal interests (and
the ways in which this avenue was kept open, such as in discourses
of nationalism, are lamentably absent from the purview of Structural
Transformation). The continuity of the term ‘private interest’ between
the bourgeois and post-bourgeois public spheres actually obscures
a critical discontinuity central to Habermas’s thesis, namely in
the constitution of ‘privacy’ itself. What is at stake is the way in
which private interests, as units of public opinion, were thought to
be formed.
In the bourgeois model, the ‘private’ realm consisted in the
intimate, familial sphere and the economic realm of the capitalist
market place. The two components, one the precondition of the other,
were both based on the ideals of autonomy and subjective freedom.
In the self-image of an expanding, post-bourgeois public sphere, the
economic realm and the domestic sphere became unhinged from
one another. For the large majority of those who now qualifi ed as
citizens, the economic realm consisted not in capitalistic enterprise
and the free deployment of private property, but in an objectifi ed
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‘world of work’. Complex new class confi gurations emerged with
the rise of managerialism, dispersed shareholdings, and heavily
unionised occupational sectors, eclipsing the binary opposition
between property owner and wage labourer. Whilst the economy
became more intensively politicised, the realm of ‘private’ freedoms
began to close in on its contemporary associations with family life,
intimacy and leisure.
Under liberal capitalism, bourgeois family life was supposedly
set free from the realm of material production. But that autonomy
was critically dependent on the economic success of the head of
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household. Under organised capitalism, though, family life took
on a different relationship to the economic realm. The family began
to give way to the individual as the basic economic unit. The risks
associated with the economic realm become more individualised and
simultaneously softened in the context of welfarism. The welfare state
did not, of course, simply bypass the family unit. To the present day,

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