Habermas, the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:

An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.

MIT Press: Cambridge, 1989. Translated by Thomas Burger.

 

In this massive and magisterial tome originally published in German in 1962, Jürgen Habermas lays out a powerful and compelling argument about the Enlightenment and about modern European history. He finds that the most important thread that runs through that which we call modern in the West, roughly from 1500 to the modern day, is the creation of the public sphere. While he does not focus exclusively on the Enlightenment, his work has much to elucidate for us in that era, for it is during that period and in its most pivotal episodes, from the French Revolution to the upheavals of 1848, that the crucial phase of this structural transformation is manifest.

Habermas’s argument shapes his understanding not only of the Enlightenment but of modernity and democracy in general. Central to both is the division of modern society between a public and private sphere. In the West, this transformation began in nascent form during the early modern period when media (ranging from the basic printing press and the arrival of the post office to the establishment of public locales of debate such as coffee houses and public squares) allowed for the splitting of one sphere into two. This process was accelerated by trends in literature and philosophy that emphasized subjectivity over objectivity and a multitude of perspectives over uniformity. Critical discourse would eventually solidify itself into the body of intellectual thought of the Enlightenment.

While many 20th-century Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution were vulgarly simplistic and deterministic, Habermas adds sophistication and nuance to dialectical materialism. Just as in other contemporary European countries, in Bourbon France the public sphere developed through a rising market economy defined by separation between the Frenchman’s home environs and his work sphere (in the French case, this development was distorted by the joint Catholic and aristocratic contempt for productive work). Out of the market economy grew a liberal public sphere defined by debate and discourse on political issues and shaped by an emerging bourgeois class. The French monarchy made its own missteps, helping along the shift from a presentational sphere (such as Versailles) in which the power of absolutism was simply presented to the people as a fait accompli, to a discursive sphere in which the legitimacy of the Crown and the monarch’s own person were open to discussion and disparagement. Driven forward by polemical pamphlets, Enlightenment salons, and the like, this discursive sphere undermined the power of the Old Regime, culminating in the fatal decision to call the Estates General and give rancor and revolution a perfect opening. Eventually, the Revolution, and its further building upon and shaping of the public sphere, became inevitable. The long 19th century of the French institutionalized the public sphere, paving the way for the rest of Europe.

Like his Frankfurt School comrades, Habermas has a highly critical view towards modernity and of the claims of the modern West to democratic government. Much like Adorno and others, he criticizes the devotion to consumerism and the hypocrisy that has defined bourgeoisie liberal culture in past and in present. In terms of critics, Habermas himself has not proven immune to the same criticism directed at the Marxist school in general in the past half century, and his argument has been undermined by poststructuralism, postmodernism, and other fads of academia. Despite containing flaws and omissions like any other important work, Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere continues to provide a superbly well-thought-out and admirably flexible for historians explaining the upheavals that have defined modern European history.