Page 9 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

4 Jürgen Habermas

the relationship between law, morality and reason, or an institutionally
abstract preoccupation with constitutional norms and human rights,
both of which have been at the centre of the Habermasian project
in recent years.
The point of Structural Transformation is not to provide a history
to feed our nostalgic aspirations, and Habermas himself has never
idealised the eighteenth-century public sphere to quite the degree
that his critics have charged. Instead, it offers us a frame of reference
which may help us to reflect on both the points of connection and the

discontinuities between the past and our current predicament. Though
as historiography it may not always pass muster with professional
historians, scholars of social and political thought can find more in

Structural Transformation than in any of Habermas’s more recent works
to expose the slippages between ambiguous, complex histories and
virtuous ideals or grand theoretical systems. We start, then, with a
survey of the main themes of Structural Transformation.

THE BOURGEOIS PUBLIC SPHERE

Under feudalism, Habermas reports, the ‘public realm’ existed not
as a sphere of interaction and debate but merely of representation:
aristocracy and nobility played out the symbolic dramas of majesty
and highness before their subjects. To talk of a public realm is even
misleading insofar as ‘publicness’, as a status attribute or performative
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mode, was more significant than spatial location. The links between

this ‘representative publicness’ and today’s mass-mediated spectacles
of public life are thin: it was simply staged performance before the
people, not on behalf of a public. In fact, there was no ‘public’ as
such, only public display. A distinct public realm and its corollary, a
distinct private sphere, were all but absent. However, emergent forms

of trade and finance capitalism – Habermas here focuses on Britain,
France and Germany – and the eventual establishment of a ‘civil
society’ underpinned by the ideology of ‘private’ autonomy, would
eventually transform ‘publicness’ into something very different.
Long before feudalism was in its death throes, the increasing
geographical reach and regularity of early capitalist trading set in
train an expanding network of communications, primarily trade
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newsletters. To begin with, the newsletters circulated among closed
networks of merchants. This was not yet the rise of a print-based
public culture. ‘Publicness’ was still the preserve of the feudal powers
and it remained primarily oral, theatrical and immediate. By the

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