Page 34 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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Discursive Testing:
The Public Sphere and its Critics

This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the critical responses
that Structural Transformation has provoked. My account will, of
necessity, be selective and will focus on those commentaries that I
think are useful – even where they are problematic – in helping us
to clarify certain important issues and in highlighting unresolved
dilemmas and tensions within the Habermasian perspective on the
public sphere. Given that Habermas’s methodology in Structural
Transformation, which differs markedly from his later work, involves
historical excavation in search of a normative model of democracy
relevant to the present, many critical commentaries have taken issue
with the historiographic credentials of the book. The fact that these
historical excavations are carried out in the service of this normative
goal means we might be tempted to set such controversies aside as
somehow peripheral or pedantic. But, although the Habermasian
project as a whole does not rest on historicist foundations, Structural
Transformation does implore us to learn something from the past
and to understand that the values of critical publicity constitute
something other than mere abstract morality conjured in a historical
vacuum. Moreover, some of the issues raised by historian critics are
particularly salient for conceptual discussions of the public sphere.
We begin, then, with a brief discussion of historiography which, in
its brevity and broad sweep, might not satisfy the historian but which
is intended to bring questions of conceptual coherence rather than
questions of accuracy to the foreground.

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

Structural Transformation aimed to chart the rise and unfulfi lled
promises of ‘critical publicity’. As with most overtly political history
writing, it lays itself open to the charge that the end justifi ed distorted
means; that it is simplistic and melodramatic in the contrast it draws
between two epochs (liberal and organised capitalism); and that it is
overly rigid in its application of two competing categories of publicity

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