Jurgen Habermas

The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Summary

The bourgeois public sphere evolved in the tense field between state and society, but remained part of the private realm. The separation of those two spheres initially referred only to the separation of political power and social reproduction, which, in the Middle Ages, were linked. Production was disengaged from public authority, and vice versa. Public power rose above privatised society.

The increased state intervention of the nineteenth century did not lead to the interlocking of the public sphere with the private. Interventionist policy or neomercantilism was linked to the refeudalization of society. Interventionism transferred onto the political level conflicts that could not be settled in the private sphere. The basis of the bourgeois public sphere - the separation of state and society - was destroyed by the increasing statification of society and the increasing societalization of the state. A repoliticized public sphere emerged in which the public-private distinction did not apply. This also led to the disintegration of the liberal public sphere.

From 1873 onwards, trade policy shifted. The principles of free trade were abandoned in favor of protectionism. Mergers and oligopolies became increasingly in domestic and capital markets. Restriction of competition came to prevail in international commodity markets. During the late nineteenth century developments, society was forced to stop claiming to be a sphere free from power. The antagonistic structure of civil society was increasingly revealed; the more society became a nexus of coercion, the greater need existed for a strong state. But as long as the state was liberal, it was not interested in altering the private-public relationship. Only when new state functions arose did the barrier between state and society erode. This erosion pushed the economically weak into using political means against stronger market competitors.

The state engaged in new activities; it began to assume formative functions, like strengthening the middle classes and alleviating poverty. The state also assumed the provision of services that had formerly been private; it intervened in the sphere of labor and commodity exchange A repoliticized social sphere was formed, in which state and societal institutions fused into a single complex that was not entirely public or private. This new interdependence was also expressed in the breakdown of the classical system of law. The entire status of private law changed, and the state "escaped" out of public law. The tasks of public administration were transferred to institutions and agencies in private law.

The conjugal family became dissociated from social reproduction. The intimate sphere moved to the edge of the private sphere, which became deprivatized. The realms of labor and the family separated. Institutional and bureaucratic structures produced a type of work that was very different to work in a private occupation. The distinction between working for oneself and for others was replaced by a status of function.

The occupational sphere separated from the private sphere, and the family drew back on itself. It disengaged from the world of labor, and lost its ability to support itself. The state began to compensate for this with various types of assistance. The family became the consumer of leisure time and the recipient of public assistance. It also lost its power as an agent of personal internalisation. Now, individual family members are socialized directly by society. The loss of the private sphere and the loss of access to the public sphere became typical of modern urban life. Rational-critical debate gave way to the fetish of community involvement. Now the domain of leisure tends to take the place of the literary public sphere.

The literary public sphere was replaced by a pseudo-public and sham-private world of culture consumption. Rational critical debate was removed from the constraints of survival requirements, allowing the idea of humanity to develop. The link between the property owner and the human being relied on the public- private separation. But as the literary public sphere spread into the world of consumption, this changed. Leisure behavior was apolitical and could not constitute a public sphere. When the laws of the market entered the public sphere, rational critical debate was replaced by consumption. Individual reception replaced the web of communication. Real privacy was replaced by a travesty of the culture industry. New relations of dependence resulted from the uncoupling of the intimate sphere from the basis of property as capital.

Now, the interior domain of subjectivity acts only as a conduit for the mass media and cultural consumption. From the nineteenth century, the institutions that guaranteed the coherence of a critically debating public were weakened. The family lost its role as a circle of literary propaganda, and the bourgeois salon went out of fashion. New bourgeois forms of sociability avoided rational- critical debate. Remaining debate was carefully controlled and organized, and therefore lost its publicist function.

Mass culture adapted to the needs of a less-educated public. The public itself expanded at the end of the eighteenth century, but the type of culture they interacted with was not lowered to the masses. The market in culture goods effected this transformation. The modern market in books partly shows the operation of the culture through market process. Other transforming devices such as newspapers show how opinion and criticism recede into the background. Radio, TV and films restrict the viewer's response, and put him in "tutelage". The world of mass media is a public sphere in appearance only, and also a fake private sphere. The idea of human interest stories represents a cheapened kind of sentiment.

Even higher status groups participate in the mass-media world. Isolated intellectuals have been replaced by well-paid cultural functionaries. The avant garde is now institutionalized. The educated public is split into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use non-publicly and the uncritical mass of consumers. It lacks the communication necessary for a public.

The literary public sphere has lost its specific character. The public sphere assumes advertising functions. The new intermediate social sphere does not require public rational-critical debate. Now, one "political" public sphere is absorbed by another, which is depoliticised by the consumption of culture. Publicity is generated from above to give an aura of goodwill. Publicity hides the domination of non-public opinion. Critical publicity is replaced by manipulative publicity. The way that public opinion operates in the political realm is shown by the disintegration of the link between public discussion and legal norm. The foundation for a homogeneous public of private citizens is shaken. The consensus developed in rational-critical debate is replaced by a compromise between organized interests fought out or imposed non- publicly. The original connection between the public sphere in the private realm and the rule of law shown by Kant is lost. A mediatized public is called on for public acclamation, but is separated from the exercise of power.

Analysis

Habermas again addresses history and social structures to chart the decline and decay of the public sphere in the modern period. He argues that this decline was due to a variety of socioeconomic factors. When the bourgeois public sphere existed, state and society were separated. There could be no state intervention in the economy before the nineteenth century, Habermas believes. Interventionism, which is basically government involvement in civil society and the economy, was part of the process of "refeudalization". Habermas uses this term to describe the linking of the modern state and economy; in a way, it is a return to the unified state structure of the feudal period. The state began to take on the economic functions of civil society, and the interests of society began to involve themselves in the state. The two realms became blurred together.

Habermas links interventionism to specific economic policies such as protectionism, mergers, and oligopolies. The image of civil society as an arena of economic and personal freedom is dented by constant government intervention. But in a way this intervention is justified. As Hegel suggests, the chaotic and antagonistic nature of civil society demands intervention by the state. Habermas does not believe that state intervention alone broke the barrier between society and state. The fact that economic interest groups in civil society begin to play out their conflicts in the political sphere is also important.

The ultimate result is that something like what Hannah Arendt described as the "social" emerged: a fusion of state and social interests that merged their practical roles and legal definitions. In Germany, at least, more and more "state" tasks are transferred to private agencies, Habermas believes.

Changes occurred within society as well. The family separated from the economy. It is no longer the center of labor and property. The state effectively had to prop up the family through social assistance. The family is now involved with public authority. The role of the family as a provider of emotional training also changed. People now learn how to feel, and how to love outside the family. The earlier model of private people who moved into the public sphere after gaining status and emotional ability within the family no longer applies.

Work changed also. People became involved with large corporations. Self- employment was no longer the norm. Workers now gained status within an organization instead of having autonomy in the private sphere. Leisure was another development. Rational-critical debate was replaced by involvement in the local community and a range of non-political and uncritical activities. The consumption of products and experiences was related to leisure. It is a fundamentally uncritical act of receiving material from the media.

A whole new set of cultural relations evolved. People were now dependent in a variety of ways. They lacked the autonomy they previously received from property ownership and rational critical debate. Moreover, they were dependent on the mass media and on cultural consumption. Rational-critical debate died out slowly as the institutions that fostered it changed. Modern people, Habermas believes, now watch T.V. instead of talking about newspapers in a coffee house.

Institutional change is matched by changes in people themselves. There is now no basic similarity amongst educated people. Most people merely consume. Those who are more educated do not debate or criticize in public or enlighten others.

Habermas identifies a more serious note in these changes. Publicity is now purposely created to manipulate people. The non-public opinions of specific interest groups take over the public sphere, and all possibility of rational debate vanishes. All that remains is enforced compromise. There is no a suitable foundation for general laws, or acts as a check on the domination of state power.

Habermas's message is that the liberal and bourgeois public sphere depended absolutely on certain social and economic conditions. Once these conditions changed, the composition of the public and the nature of debate cannot be guaranteed in any way. The emergence of cultural consumption and leisure, a central concern of the Frankfurt School, create a new, debased form of publicity. The influence of Theodor Adorno's ideas about modern culture is clear in this section. It seems clear that Habermas approves of Adorno's critique.

The Transformation of the Public Sphere's Political Function

Summary

The shift in function of the principle of publicity is based on a shift in the functions of the public sphere as a special realm. This shift can be seen clearly in its key institution - the press. The press became increasingly commercialized. As the press developed, a political function was added to its economic one; papers became leaders and carriers of public opinion. Only when the bourgeois constitutional state developed could the press concentrate on making a profit. The advertising business was important in this development. The original basis of publicist institutions was reversed. In the traditional public sphere, the institutions of the public engaged in rational-critical debate were protected from the state because they were in private hands. Now they were complexes of societal power.

The press began to shape critical debate, rather than transmitting it. As the press is affected by advertising, private people as owners of property affected private people as a public. Habermas charts the history of the advertising business.

Economic advertising achieved an awareness of its political character in public relations work. Public relations directly attempts to manipulate public opinion, and to engineer consent by making people believe that they are critically forming an opinion. Publicity once meant exposing political domination: now it means an uncommitted friendly disposition. As companies make consumers feel like they are citizens when consuming, the state has to address its citizens like consumers.

A second apparatus developed to meet the publicity needs of the state and other institutions. The state bureaucracy borrowed the techniques of opinion management, and societal interest groups took over some bureaucratic functions. When private interests assumed political form, the public sphere became an arena in which conflicts must be settled. Political decisions became a form of bargaining. Responsibility for compromise moved from the legislator to the bureaucracy or parties. Such special-interest associations are private associations with great political power. They manipulate public opinion but are not controlled by it. There are similarities with old-style representative publicity. The refeudalized public sphere contains large organizations that manage and propagate their positions. Today the public sphere has to be created; it no longer exists.

Habermas discusses changes in German political parties. In modern parliaments, the interlocking of organized interests and their official translation into party machines makes parliament a committee for representing party lines. Publicity is an uncritical, staged display.

Any attempt to restore the liberal public sphere through reducing its expanded form will only weaken its remaining functions. The public sphere commanded by societal interests can perform political criticism, but only if it becomes a public sphere in the true sense. Publicity should be extended to institutions like the mass media and parties. They need to be organized according to a principle of publicity that allows public rational-critical debate. Today, publicity can be achieved only as a rationalization of the exercise of societal and political power under the mutual control of rival organizations committed to publicity. This is very different to staged publicity that aims at public acclamation.

Citizens entitled to services adopt an attitude of demand towards the state. In the social-welfare state, the political interests of the citizens are reduced to claims specific to certain branches and organizations. Whatever is left over is appropriated by parties for a vote. The degeneration of the public sphere is shown by the parties' need to generate one. But the democratic arrangement of elections still needs the liberal fiction of a public sphere. Parts of the liberal public sphere are preserved in the social composition of modern voters. Modern political discussions are restricted and often involve confirming previously-held views. The voting constituency is not a coherent public; different parts of it are influenced by different factors.

The industry of political marketing emerges when parties feel obliged to influence voting decisions in this way. Political marketing depends on the empirical techniques of market and opinion research. In the manipulated public sphere it creates, an acclamation-prone mood predominates. Appeals to the public are calculated to give predictable results. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to satisfy the real needs of the voters. But the offers made by advertising psychology form a consensus better suited to the needs of an absolutist regime than a democratic constitutional state. If political decisions are made to manipulate voters in a public sphere created for this purpose, they are removed from the process of rational-critical argument and the possibility of voting against them.

The gap between the functions the public sphere fulfils today, and those it should fill in a democratic state are obvious when the transfer to a social- welfare state is legislated. In the first modern constitutions, subdivisions of basic rights are the image of the liberal public sphere. Liberal basic rights protected "private" areas from state intervention. They also guaranteed equal opportunity and participation in generating wealth and public opinion. The liberal state intended to order the system of coexistence in society as a whole. The social-welfare state continued the tradition of the constitutional state because it too wanted a legal order that comprised state and society. As the state took on social functions, it had to work out how "justice" could be administered through intervention. Almost all western democracies have programmatic statements relating to the adaptation of legal institutions of social welfare. Guarantees of basic rights depend on a separation of private sphere and public sphere operating in the political realm not subject to state intervention. Such guarantees are supplemented by basic social rights because the demarcation of areas of non-intervention by the state are not honored. Only if the state guarantees this can the political order remain faithful to the earlier idea of a public sphere. But liberal rights have to be interpreted as guarantees of participation if they are to fulfil their purpose. A guarantee that the state will not interfere is not enough; it needs to interfere actively to ensure participation. What can no longer be guaranteed in relationships between public and private spheres must be positively granted - a share in social benefits and participation in the institutions of the public sphere.

The political public sphere of the welfare state shows two competing tendencies; staged and manipulative publicity and the critical process of public communication. This criticism conflicts with manipulative publicity. The more committed it is to social rights, the less a state will accept that the public sphere is a reality. The extent to which staged publicity prevails shows how much the exercise of political and social authority is regulated.

The extent to which the public sphere can be realized depends on resolving two problems. 1) The expertise of highly specialized experts is removed from the supervision of rationally debating bodies. 2) Modern society raises the possibility of the mutual satisfaction of needs in an "affluent society". Also, the possibility of global destruction has arisen. Universal interest in ending the state of nature in international relations has emerged.

The outcome of the struggle between critical and staged publicity remains open. Unlike the idea of the bourgeois public sphere in the liberal period, publicity regarding the exercise and balance of political power is not ideology. Rather, it ends ideology.

Analysis

Habermas treats the press as a case study of the changes that occurred in the public sphere. His treatment of literary journalism shows how the economic and political functions of the press developed together. Making money and shaping or reflecting public opinion were related in complex ways. The history of the press mirrors that of state and society. The press began as a key private institution of rational-critical debate; it provoked and transmitted this debate, but did not shape it. It was protected from state control because it was privately owned. However, the development of advertising changed this situation.

Advertising is the representation of private interests to the public in an attempt to influence the public. It represents the blurring of private and public, and is a result of the dominance of private interests in the public sphere. Public relations is the less subtle cousin of advertising. It involves the direct manipulation of public opinion. This manipulation is unconscious: people believe that they are being given all the necessary information, and being allowed to reason critically. In fact, they are being tricked into approving of whatever policy the politicians present to them.

The increased and manipulative role of private interests in the political public sphere is matched by state, which takes over the techniques of public relations itself. Those who follow modern American politics will find this a familiar story.

Organizations that use these techniques are generally private associations that come from civil society: pressure groups, political parties or even charities. They have great power because they access and control the power of the public. However, they are often unaccountable. They public that they manipulate has lost its power to criticize them. Similarly, parliament is manipulated and sidelined by such large organizations.

The general tendency that Habermas identifies is for the real public sphere to disappear altogether. All that remains is a mass, uncritical public that is manipulated into a sham-public at election-time. It is a shadow of its former self. Other forms of opinion manipulation exist in the modern "public sphere". Political marketing aims to influence the public at election time. It aims to create a public ready to applaud whatever rubbish the politicians throw at them, and rules out the possibility of rational, critical opposition. Habermas's opinion of modern politics in general is not favorable.

The establishment of the social-welfare state (which is the norm in Western Europe) reveals the gap between the model public sphere and reality. The constitution of the social-welfare state is a complex mix of aspects of the bourgeois state and modern attempts to guarantee a commitment to state intervention in welfare questions.

In the face of such a negative picture of modern politics, Habermas makes several suggestions about what might be done. Reducing the expanded public sphere by restricting the number of people eligible to vote is not the answer, he claims. Rather, the corrupted public sphere needs to reassert its true form. Organizations and institutions need to be subjected to publicity. Their activities and structure must be publicly known and rationally debated.

The new social-political form of domination needs to be rationalized and legitimated by different organizations committed to publicity. Only this procedure can check domination. Staged publicity is no substitute. Habermas believes that the reassertion of an authentic public sphere is possible and necessary. Its success depends on the ability of the public to engage with and debate new technology and specialized bureaucracy such as the complexities of new weapons technology or public finance. His second problem is specific to the latter stages of a developed capitalist society. Habermas has based his discussion of the modern debased public sphere on the idea that interest groups are bound to compete. But what if economic growth and the expansion of wealth in society could satisfy all these needs at once? Sadly, this question seems less approachable now. A more developed capitalist society than the one in which Habermas lived is still struggling to extract even manufactured consensus in some cases. Habermas's third point, about the possibility of global destruction, seems more relevant today.