Page 36 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 31

of discourse occupying the public sphere. Geof Eley, for example,
criticises Habermas for filtering out the myriad agonistic, insurgent,

contestatory, and status- or prestige-laden discourses of the liberal–
capitalist public sphere in his quest for a relatively purifi ed model
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of egalitarian, consensual, rational–critical debate. But if Habermas
did not give due attention to the plurality of discursive practices and
institutions within bourgeois circles, then the way in which he treats
non-bourgeois practices and institutions is particularly controversial.
This is something which will concern us in the following section (and
in subsequent chapters) at a more theoretical level, but the problem
of exclusion (particularly the exclusion of women and the working

classes) has been flagged repeatedly by historian critics as well as by
social and political theorists. Habermas tells us that the public sphere
was, from its inception, built on certain exclusionary mechanisms.

But Habermas’s narrative of exclusion may be flawed. Keith Baker,
for example, claims that it was not merely the eighteenth-century
bourgeoisie, but also various sites of working-class discourse which
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contributed to the development of ‘critical publicity’. The problem
is not that Habermas denies the participation of the working classes
(in Jacobin and Chartist guises, for example) in agitating for expanded
suffrage, greater press freedom and so on, but rather that he portrays
these values as if they were simply derivative of a bourgeois tradition
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that was the true birthplace of critical publicity. In simultaneously
intersecting with and diverging from the dominant bourgeois
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model, these ‘others’ are signifi cant for any consideration of the
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development of ‘the’ public sphere writ large. For social theorists
rather than historians the relative accuracy of competing readings
is less important than the lesson of interpretive plurality: we should
always remain attentive to the significance of marginal and subaltern

political spaces whose existence, but also, more specifi cally, whose
formal and procedural characteristics, fall outside the purview of
mainstream narratives of the past, present and future.
A similar problem emerges with the way Habermas portrays the
exclusion of women from the political public sphere. Again, the
problem lies not so much in Habermas underestimating the forces of
exclusion at play within the bourgeois public sphere but in the concept
of ‘exclusion’ itself. As Nancy Fraser puts it, ‘the view that women were
excluded from the public sphere [is] ideological; it rests on a class- and
gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the
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bourgeois public’s claim to be the public’. To begin with, Habermas
largely (though not entirely) neglects the positive contribution made

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