Page 39 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

34 Jürgen Habermas

David Zaret argues that Habermas fails to account properly for the
various historical dynamics which, whilst intimately connected with
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the capitalist economy, are not reducible to it. The technological
development of mass printing, religious developments in the wake of
the Reformation, the development of scientifi c and anthropocentric
world-views – in other words, those facets of modernity which, taken
together, fed into (and off) the increased confidence and autonomy

of the bourgeoisie – do, indeed, lack a suitably prominent position
in the narrative of Structural Transformation. This isn’t the place at
which to rehearse that classic duel between Marxian and Weberian

paradigms. For now it will suffice to point out that Habermas himself
has acknowledged that the economistic bias of this early work was
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problematic. And as we shall see, Habermas’s subsequent attempts
to rework the theory of the public sphere decentre the economy
and move decisively away from treating ‘classes’ as economically
determined ‘macro-subjects’.

EQUALITY AND EMANCIPATION
In writing Structural Transformation, Habermas was to a large extent
addressing the Left in 1960s West Germany. Peter Hohendahl outlines
some of the responses that the book provoked amongst Habermas’s
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target audience. He distinguishes between those Marxist detractors
(such as Ulf Milde) who condemned Habermas’s ‘bourgeois’ discourse
out of hand and those (such as Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge) who
criticised it as conservative but also saw something important in it
that could be rescued. According to Milde, Habermas unforgivably
paints the bourgeois public sphere as an embodiment of the principle
of freedom; he conceives of bourgeois property relations as apolitical;
and he overlooks the role of antagonistic class relations. Hohendahl
could swiftly dispense with such a response not because there is no
debate to be had about the very possibility (and mystifi cation) of
a public sphere free from domination and inequality (and we will
return to this question), but because without acknowledging that
Habermas’s entire thesis rests on the notion of a post-liberal order
in which the ideological obfuscations of the bourgeois public sphere
are brought out into the open and challenged, such a discussion

immediately misfires. Hohendahl speculates on the motives behind
such an apparently intentional misreading and suggests a knee-jerk
reaction not to the substantive arguments advanced in Structural

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