Page 35 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

30 Jürgen Habermas

(‘critical’ and ‘manipulative’) to each respectively. Habermas himself
has acknowledged, retrospectively, a disjuncture between his ‘fall
from grace’ narrative and the complexities exposed by more measured
historiography: ‘my diagnosis of a unilinear development from a
politically active public to one withdrawn into a bad privacy, from a
1
“culture-debating to a culture-consuming public,” is too simplistic’,
he concedes.
Such disjuncture, according to Craig Calhoun, is underscored by
an imbalanced methodology:

A central weakness is that Structural Transformation does not treat the
‘classical’ bourgeois public sphere and the postransformation [sic] public
sphere of ‘organised’ capitalism symmetrically. Habermas tends to judge the
eighteenth century by Locke and Kant, the nineteenth century by Marx and
Mill, and the twentieth century by the typical suburban television viewer. Thus
Habermas’s account of the twentieth century does not include the sort of
intellectual history, the attempt to take leading thinkers seriously and recover
the truth from their ideologically distorted writings, that is characteristic of
his approach to seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. 2

We should bear in mind, though, that Habermas’s portrait of the
twentieth century in Structural Transformation is, rightly or not,
premised precisely upon the notion of an alienated post-Enlightenment
intelligentsia, now aloof from the morass of popular culture and
populist politics. (Tellingly, in fact, Calhoun does not suggest which
aspects of twentieth-century intellectual history Habermas ought to
have drawn more heavily upon.) Moreover, we could equally argue
that, in terms of historical analysis, it is precisely the prominent
role of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual fi gures
which is problematic. For all the interesting historical evidence which
Habermas adduces (and to which our synopsis in Chapter 1 could
scarcely do justice), he tends ultimately to interpret the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries through the rigidified theoretical frameworks

of those great Enlightenment thinkers. It is unsurprising, then, that
various critical responses to Structural Transformation have drawn on
revisionist historiography in order to take aim at the linear sweep of
Habermas’s narrative.
First, we should take seriously the claim that Habermas’s account
valorises a particular mode of (bourgeois) ‘rational’ communication
which may, indeed, be discernible from the period he characterises
as its heyday, but which may account for only one of various modes

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