The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society

Jürgen Habermas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745694146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Sozialphilosophie

This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere - that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory.

Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political theorists, including Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville, and the specific institutions and social forms in which the public sphere was realized.

This brilliant and influential work has been widely recognized for many years as a classic of contemporary social and political thought, of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Notes

Preface

1. Cf. W. Hennis, “Bemerkungen zur wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Situation der politischen Wissenschaft,” Staat, Gesellschaft, Erziehung 5:203ff.; idem., Politik und praktische Philosophie (Neuwied, 1963); regarding the latter, see my essay, “The Classical Doctrine of Politics in Relation to Social Philosophy,” Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston, 1973), 41-81.

1 Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere

1. See below, 238ff.

2. Deutsches Wörterbuch der Brüder Grimm (Leipzig, 1889), 7:1183, art. “Öffentlichkeit.”

3. Weigands Deutsches Wörterbuch, 5th ed. (Giessen, 1910), 2:232.

4. Most recently H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).

5. See J. Kirchner, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs “öffentlich” und “öffentliches Recht Ph.D. diss. (Göttingen, 1949), 2. The res publica is the property that is universally accessible to the populus, i.e. the res extra commercium, which is exempted from the law that applies to the privati and their property; e.g.,flumen publwum, via publica, etc. Ibid., lOff.

6. Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft (Brünn, 1943), 386f.

7. Kirchner, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs, 22.

8. We leave aside the problem of late medieval town sovereignty. On the level of the “territory” we encounter the towns (which usually belonged to the prince’s crown land) as an integral component of feudalism. In early capitalism, however, the free towns assumed a decisive role in the evolution of the bourgeois public sphere. See below, section 3, 25ff.

9. The Oxford Dictionary (1909), 7:2.

10. On the history of the concept of “representation,” see the remarks in H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), p.125, n. 53 (on 513-14): “The history of this word is very informative. The Romans used it, but in the light of the Christian idea of the incarnation and the mystical body it acquired a completely new meaning. Representation now no longer means ‘copy’ or ‘representation in a picture’ … but ‘replacement.’ The word can obviously have this meaning because what is represented is present in the copy. Repraesentare means ‘to make present.’… The important thing about the legal idea of representation is that the persona repraesentata is only the person represented, and yet the representative, who is exercising the former’s right, is dependent on him.” See also the supplementary observation on p.514: “Repraesentatio in the sense of ‘representation’ on the stage—which in the middle ages can only mean in a religious play—can be found already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries…. this does not mean that repraesentatio signifies ‘performance’ but signifies, until the seventeenth century, the represented presence of the divine itself.”

11. C. Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1957), 208ff.; on the localization of this medieval concept of publicity in the context of intellectual history, see A. Dempf, Sacrum Imperium (Darmstadt, 1954), esp. ch. 2, pp. 2Iff., on the “Forms of Publicity.”

12. Carl Schmitt observes that the rhetorical formula is as intimately connected to representative publicity as discussion is linked to the bourgeois version: “It is not speech in the form of discussion and argumentation but, if the expression be permitted, representative speech [that is] decisive…. Slipping neither into discourse, nor dictate, nor dialectic, it moves along in its architecture. Its grand diction is more than music; it is human dignity become visible in the rationality of speech as it assumes form. All this presupposes a hierarchy, for the spiritual resonance of grand rhetoric comes from faith in the representation to which the orator lays claim.” Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (München, 1925), 32f.

13. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York, 1951) 1:209-10.

14. Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form, 26.

15. J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, NY, 1952).

16. For a view that differs from Jacob Burchkhardt’s famous interpretation, see the exposition by O. Brunner, Adeliges Landleben (Salzburg, 1949), 108ff.

17. On the plane of intellectual history Gadamer develops the connection between this early tradition of educational humanism and those formulae of sensus communis and of “taste” (a category in moral philosophy) whose sociological implications reveal the significance of courtly humanism for the formation of the “public sphere.” With regard to Gracian’s educational ideal, he comments: “It is remarkable within the history of Western ideals of Bildung for being independent of class. It is the ideal of a society based on Bildung…. Taste is not only the ideal created by a new society, but we see this ideal of ‘good taste’ producing what was subsequently called ‘good society.’ Its criteria are no longer birth and rank but simply the shared nature of its judgments or, rather, its capacity to rise above the narrowness of interests and private predilections to the title of judgment. The concept of taste undoubtedly includes a mode of knowing. It is through good taste that we are capable of standing back from ourselves and our private preferences. Thus taste, in its essential nature, is not private, but a social phenomenon of the first order. It can even counter the private inclinations of the individual like a court of law, in the name of a universality that it represents.” Gadamer, Truth and Method, 34.

18. R. Alewyn, Das grosse Welttheater. Die Epoche der höfischen Feste (Hamburg, 1959), 14.

19. “On all public occasions, victory celebrations, and peace treaties, illuminations and fireworks are merely the finale of a day that started at dawn with rounds of cannon fire and the blowing of the town pipers from every tower, a day on which wine filled the fountains of the city and entire oxen were publicly roasted on a spit, a day that was given over, until late into the night, to the dancing and games and merriment of a crowd that had flocked together from far and wide. In the baroque period this was no different than in ages past, and only the era of the bourgeoisie wrought a gradual change.” Alewyn, Das grosse Welttheater, 43.

20. Ibid.

21. See P. Joachimsen, “Zur historischen Psychologie des deutschen Staatsgedankens,” Die Dioskuren. Jahrbuch für Geisteswissenschaften, vol. 1 (1921).

22. Weigands Deutsches Wörterbuch, 475.

23. Deutsches Wörterbuch der Brüder Grimm, 2137f.

24. The Oxford Dictionary, 1388f.

25. Dictionnaire de la Langue Française (1875), vol. 3, art. “privé.”

26. In his contribution, “Der soziale Gehalt von Goethes Roman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Erinnerungsgabe für Max Weber, ed. Melchior Palyi (München und Leipzig, 1919), 2:279ff., Werner Wittich has drawn attention to this letter from a sociological perspective. [Translator’s note: For the passages from Goethe cited in the text I have used Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), trans. Thomas Carlyle (Boston, 1901), vol. 2, bk. 5, ch. 3, pp.13-15.]

27. W. Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, 3rd ed. (München und Leipzig, 1919), vol.2, bk.l, p.33.

28. M. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1954), 160f.: “At any rate, it is clear that a mature development of merchant and financial capital is not of itself a guarantee that capitalist production will develop under its wing.”

29. Ibid., 83ff.

30. H. See, Modern Capitalism: Its Origin and Evolution (New York, 1968).

31. In Germany especially Strassburg, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Leipzig.

32. This occurred quite early on in Venice through the writers of news letters, scrittori d’avisi; in Rome they were called gazettani, in Paris nouvellistes, in London writers of letters, and in Germany Zeitunger or Novellisten. In the course of the sixteenth century they became suppliers of formal weekly reports, the newsletters, of which the so-called Fuggerzeitungen were typical in Germany. (The approximately 40,000 reports from the years between 1565 and 1605, however, originated not only in such news offices but also among employees and business friends of the House of Fugger.)

33. W. Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, 2:369.

34. For a long time the reports of the Strassburg printer and merchant Johann Carolus were held to be the oldest newspaper; see, however, the investigation by Helmut Fischer, Die ältesten Zeitungen und ihre Verleger (Augsburg, 1936).

35. The traditional fo...