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?

Jürgen Habermas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.¹² 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.³⁴

Sources

1. By the end of the century, more than 270 reading societies could be counted in Germany. 3 8 They were mostly associations with rooms that provide the oppor¬ tunity both for reading newspapers and journals and, just as importantly, for discussing what had been read. The oldest reading circles had involved nothing more than collective sub¬ scriptions that helped to lower the cost of the papers.

   The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 73

2. The bourgeois avant-garde of the educated middle class learned the art of critical-rational public debate through its contact with the "el¬ egant world." This courtly-noble society, to the extent that the modern state apparatus became independent from the mon¬ arch's personal sphere, naturally separated itself, in turn, more and more from the court and became its counterpoise in the 30 ___ town.

   The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, pp. 30–31

3. Flere bourgeois forms of social intercourse, closeness (Intimitat), and a morality played off against courtly convention were taken for granted; at any rate they no longer needed affirmation by means of demon¬ strative fraternization ceremonies.

   The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 36

4. They no longer remained components of the Church's and court's publicity of representation; that is pre¬ cisely what was meant by the loss of their aura of extraordi¬ nariness and by the profaning of their once sacramental character.

   The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 37

Where the argument is made

• 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

How the argument was received

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.