Page 261 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Information, Equality, and Integration
J¨ urgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Habermas’stermis Offentlichkeit, which can be interpreted into com-
mon English as “the public” or “publicity” and into academic English
25
as “public sphere.” The public sphere is the domain of perception and
conversation about public issues that produces and sustains public as
opposed to private opinion. Thomas McCarthy defines Habermas’scon-
ception as the realm “in which public opinion can be formed through
26
unrestricted discussion of matters of general interest.” In this formula-
tion, the concept of general interest is of greatest concern here. It is vital
to the concept of a public sphere and the conception of public opinion as-
sociated with it that communication occur about issues and interests that
are general in nature across the polity. Peter Dahlgren sharpens the con-
27
cept in terms of “questions of common concern.” The public sphere is
thereforenotmerelycivilsociety;rather,itistherealmofcommunication
about commonly perceived questions or issues that integrate civil soci-
ety and connect it to the state. In the public sphere, citizens hardly agree
about what political choices are best, but they perceive in common what
political choices are to be made. The public sphere is therefore a realm
of integration of perceptions and understandings of common issues.
A central concern for Habermas and others such as Marcuse is the
intrusion of the market into the public sphere and the collapse of the
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distinctionbetweenthepublicandtheprivate. ForJacquesEllul,market
forces aided by science and technology intrude into the public sphere and
thereby displace normative politics with mere administration – what
Lewis Mumford calls “technics” and some Frankfurt School theorists
the “totally administered society.” 29 For Habermas, this constitutes the
“refeudalization” of the public sphere.

25 For a discussion of definitions and translations, see Thomas Burger’s “Translator’s
Note” in Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
26 Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1981), p. 15.
27 PeterDahlgren,TelevisionandthePublicSphere:Citizenship,Democracy,andtheMedia
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), p. 7.
28 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (New York: Beacon, 1964).
29 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964); Lewis Mumford,
Technics and Civilization (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963); Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. 1: Technics and Human Development
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967). For overviews of relevant Frankfurt
School analysis, see McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas; and John
Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 1999).

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