Habermas 1962

Jürgen Habermas. The Structurl Transformation of the Public Sphere. Pub. 1962. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Print.

Introduction

"Preliminary Demarcation of a Type Of Bourgeois Public Sphere"

• ‘Öffentlichkeit’ a synonym of "public,” “Stadt,” “Volk,” “Welt”
• Translation Intro (Thomas McCarthy)
  • xi ...[this is] an effort to grasp the preconditions, structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain of modern society. As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state;, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.
• xii The consequent intertwining of state and society in the late c19 and the c20 meant the end of the liberal public sphere. The public sphere of social-welfare-state democracies is rather a field of competition among conflicting interests, in which organizations representing diverse constituencies negotiate and compromise among themselves and with government officials, while excluding the public from their proceedings. ...The press and broadcast media serve less as organs of public information and debate than as technologies for managing consensus and promoting consumer culture.
• [Stakes] In a post-liberal era, when the classical model of the public sphere is no longer sociopolitically feasible, the question becomes: can the public sphere be effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions? In short, is democracy possible?
• 1-2 difficulty of defining "public"
• 3 [Greece - Hellenic public sphere] Status in the polis was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos. The reproduction of life, the labor of spaces. and the service of the women went on uneeecthe aegis of the master’s domination[.]
• 4 just as the wants of life and the procurement of its necessities were shamefully hidden inside the oikos, so the polis provided an open field for honorable distinction, citizens indeed interacted as equals with equals, but each did his best to excel.
• “res publica" formed based on this idea’s transmission in Roman law into the Middle Ages
• [Now collapsing] Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable, for while its scope is expanding impressively, it’s function has become progressively insignificant. Still, publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order.
• 7 [in the Middle Ages] ...not by accident did the English king enjoy "publicness"— for lordship was something publically represented. The publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute[.]
  • public display of representation as embodiment of "higher" power
  • As long as the prince and the estates of his realm "were" the country and not just its representatives [8], they could represent it in a specific sense. They represented their lordship not for but "before" the people.
    • this could tie to Anderson 1983 with the historical conception of the "nation" being constituted of an imagined group of people sharing (or not) the same spatial coordinates
• 9-10 recession of public festivities into private could be tied to Bakhtin carnivalesque
• 10-11 [shift in early capitalism from courtly nobility to "good society" in c18] The final form of the representative publicness, reduced to the monarch’s court and at the same time receiving greater emphasis, was already an enclave within a society separating itself from the state. Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in an officially modern sense.
  • ie Public power wasn’t based on private authority
• 11 "Private" designates the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus; for "public" referees to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler.
• The authorities were contrasted with the subjects excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare, while the latter pursued their private interests.
  • Esther observes this in the "person" of the Lord Chancellor in Bleak House (1853)
• Reformation as turning religion from a public to a private matter
• 13 [discussing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister] The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced[.]