Page 23 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

18 Jürgen Habermas

in fact, policies relating to welfare payments, tax, state education
and the like, tend to invoke the nuclear family as the social norm.
But welfarism also hailed the individual to an unprecedented degree:
‘Against the so-called basic needs, which the bourgeois family once
had to bear as a private risk, the individual family member today
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is publicly protected.’ A culture of welfarism, underscored by both
state and non-state institutions, reached into domains of social
reproduction that were once the preserve of the family: social services,
relationship counselling, therapeutic services and proliferating
channels of guidance on child rearing, diet, lifestyle and the like.
But the implications for changing public–private relations are
complex. The domestic sphere became a ‘hollowed out’ realm of
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privacy making way for an increasingly inward-looking privacy
focused on leisure, consumption and lifestyle (a syndrome Habermas
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would later refer to as ‘privatism’). Habermas, in this early work, calls
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these newfound private freedoms ‘illusory’. The divorce between
public and private life was in fact one-sided and what developed
was the ‘the direct onslaught of extrafamilial authorities upon the
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individual’. In a powerful turn of phrase, Habermas speaks of a
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‘fl oodlit privacy’. Risking metaphorical excess, we might say that
what Habermas laments is a society lacking the mirrors required
either to shine the lights back on those institutions or to refl ect
adequately upon itself. In the bourgeois model, the political public
sphere aspired to the former and the literary public sphere the latter
and both were of a piece. But the reception of cultural products had
now degenerated into a mere aspect of the ‘noncommital use of
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leisure time’. A culture debating public had, according to Habermas,
been displaced by a culture consuming public.
A public sphere evolving ‘from the very heart of the private sphere
itself’ no longer existed even as an aspiration:

Bourgeois culture was not mere ideology. The rational–critical debate of
private people in the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly
subject to the cycle of production and consumption, that is, to the dictates
of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary form … it possessed instead
a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the
constraints of survival requirements. It was for these reasons alone the idea
that later degenerated into mere ideology (namely: humanity) could develop
at all. The identification of the property owner with the natural person, with
the human being as such, presupposed a separation inside the private realm
between, on the one hand, affairs that private people pursued individually

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