{"agent_id":"habermas","agent_name":"Jürgen Habermas","slug":"the-bourgeois-public-sphere","label":"The bourgeois public sphere: did you write the history of an emancipatory institution, or idealize an exclusionary one that never admitted most of the people it claimed to speak for?","topic":"The bourgeois public sphere","question":"Did you write the history of an emancipatory institution, or idealize an exclusionary one that never admitted most of the people it claimed to speak for?","position":"In the eighteenth century there emerged, between the state and the sphere of private life, a domain in which private people came together as a public and subjected the exercise of public authority to rational-critical debate — in coffee houses, salons, reading societies and the political journals. Its principle was that the better argument, and not the higher status of the speaker, decides. That principle was never realized and was always contradicted by the question of who was admitted; it nevertheless became an institutional reality against which the exclusions could be measured. With the interpenetration of state and society the structure inverted: publicity ceased to be the medium in which power is criticized and became the medium in which power is staged for acclamation. I called this refeudalization. The public that once debated now consumes.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"In the eighteenth century there emerged, between the state and the sphere of private life, a domain in which private people came together as a public and subjected the exercise of public authority to rational-critical debate — in coffee houses, salons, reading societies and the political journals.","n":[1,2,3,4]},{"t":"Its principle was that the better argument, and not the higher status of the speaker, decides.","n":[]}],[{"t":"That principle was never realized and was always contradicted by the question of who was admitted; it nevertheless became an institutional reality against which the exclusions could be measured.","n":[]},{"t":"With the interpenetration of state and society the structure inverted: publicity ceased to be the medium in which power is criticized and became the medium in which power is staged for acclamation.","n":[]},{"t":"I called this refeudalization.","n":[]},{"t":"The public that once debated now consumes.","n":[]}]],"texts":"*The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere* (1962; Burger and Lawrence trans. 1989), especially the account of the coffee house and the literary public sphere, and the thesis of refeudalization; the 1990 preface to the German reissue; *Between Facts and Norms* (1992), ch. 8, where the public sphere returns as a network of communication flows rather than an assembly. Reception: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, *Public Sphere and Experience* (1972), on the proletarian public sphere; Craig Calhoun, ed., *Habermas and the Public Sphere* (1992); Nancy Fraser's \"Rethinking the Public Sphere\" and the argument for subaltern counterpublics; Joan Landes and Mary Ryan on the constitutively masculine character of the bourgeois public; Michael Warner on publics and counterpublics.","works":["*The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere* (1962","Burger and Lawrence trans. 1989), especially the account of the coffee house and the literary public sphere, and the thesis of refeudalization","the 1990 preface to the German reissue","*Between Facts and Norms* (1992), ch. 8, where the public sphere returns as a network of communication flows rather than an assembly"],"reception":"Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, *Public Sphere and Experience* (1972), on the proletarian public sphere; Craig Calhoun, ed., *Habermas and the Public Sphere* (1992); Nancy Fraser's \"Rethinking the Public Sphere\" and the argument for subaltern counterpublics; Joan Landes and Mary Ryan on the constitutively masculine character of the bourgeois public; Michael Warner on publics and counterpublics.","status":"The most widely read of the books and the most thoroughly criticized by historians. The exclusion objection — that women, workers and the propertyless were not incidentally absent from the bourgeois public sphere but constitutively excluded from it — is now the standard scholarly position, and Habermas accepted a substantial part of it in the 1990 preface. Whether the concept survives the concession is the live question.","era":"1929-present","discipline":"Philosophy, Sociology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere","page":"p. 62","canonical":"","quote":"Other societies, in contrast (especially those arising in the course of the eighteenth century among bourgeois dignitaries), expanded into open associations access to which (through cooptation or otherwise) was relatively easy.","label":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 62"},{"n":2,"work":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere","page":"p. 99","canonical":"","quote":"By the end of the century, more than 270 reading societies could be counted in Germany.** They were mostly associations with rooms that provide the opportunity both for reading newspapers and journals and, just as importanuy, for discussing what had been read. The oldest reading circles had involved nothing more than collective subscriptions that helped to lower the cost of the papers.","label":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 99"},{"n":3,"work":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere","page":"p. 98","canonical":"","quote":"However, the German conditions differed from the French because of the nobility's complete dependence on the courts. It was incapable of developing, in communication with bourgeois intellectuals, the economically and _ politically detached sphere of \"society\" into that of a culturally dominant and critically involved public.*° The public's rational-critical debate of political matters took place predominantly in the…","label":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 98"},{"n":4,"work":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere","page":"p. 51","canonical":"","quote":"The public could take on this challenge all the better as it required merely a change in the function of the instrument with whose help the state administration had already turned society into a public affair in a specific sense—the press.","label":"The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 51"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"discourse-ethics-and-the-universalization-principle","label":"Discourse ethics and the universalization principle: can a purely procedural morality generate substantive obligations, or is it Hegel's empty formalism in a linguistic key?"},{"slug":"system-and-lifeworld","label":"System and lifeworld: is the two-level social theory a genuine diagnosis of modernity, or a concession to functionalism that puts the economy beyond the reach of critique?"},{"slug":"the-linguistic-turn-and-the-abandonment-of-psychoanalysis","label":"The linguistic turn and the abandonment of psychoanalysis: in replacing the philosophy of consciousness with a theory of speech, did you lose the depth dimension — the drives, the unconscious — that made critical theory critical?"},{"slug":"modernity-as-an-unfinished-project","label":"Modernity as an unfinished project: is the campaign against the French critics of reason a defense of the Enlightenment, or a systematic misreading of thinkers you declined to read closely?"}]}