New Public Spheres

Recontextualizing the Intellectual

Peter Thijssen, Walter Weyns, Sara Mels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317088141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The public sphere provides a domain of social life in which public opinion is expressed by means of rational discourse and debate. Habermas linked its historical development to the coffee houses and journals in England, Parisian salons and German reading clubs. He described it as a bourgeois public sphere, where private people come together and where they turn from a politically disempowered bourgeoisie into an effective political agent - the public intellectual. With communication networks being diversified and expanded over time, the worldwide web has put pressure on traditional public spheres. These new informal and horizontal networks shaped by the internet create new contexts in which an anonymous and dispersed public may gather in political e-communities to reflect critically on societal issues. These de-centered modes of communication and influence-seeking change the role of the (traditional) public intellectual and - at first sight - seem to make their contributions less influential. What processes, therefore, influence changes within public spheres and how can intellectuals assert authority within them? Should we speak of different types of intellectuals, according to the different modes of public intellectual engagement? This ground-breaking volume gives a multi-disciplinary account of the way in which public intellectuals have constructed their role and position in the public sphere in the past, and how they try to voice public concerns and achieve authority again within those fragmented public spheres today.

PART I
History and Contemporary Developments

Chapter 1
The Intellectual in the Public Sphere: Projections, Contradictions and Dilemmas since the Enlightenment

Harold Mah

The organizing statement of this volume, expressed in the title, indicates that its understanding of the public sphere is of course taken from Jürgen Habermas’s book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. This was originally published in 1962, but started to become remarkably influential in a variety of disciplines in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter discusses some of the things I have already said about Habermas’s theory (Mah 2000), but this time in relation to the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. The emergence of the modern public intellectual illustrates particularly cogently certain underlying assumptions and issues in Habermas’s theory and specifically how that theory and the modern intellectual exemplify a particular Enlightenment narrative of emancipation which both empowers the modern intellectual but also produces acute contradictions and dilemmas. This consideration of the public intellectual further elucidates Habermas’s theory in a new way, pointing to another neglected issue in his notion of the public sphere, namely the problematic role of emotional identification or empathy and what that has meant for public intellectuals and possibly for us today.

The Modern Intellectual: Paragon of the Public Sphere

In Habermas’s theory, the public sphere emerged in eighteenth-century Western Europe when people came together to discuss the issues of the day. They came together in new social venues – the English coffee house, the French salon, the German reading club. When people gathered together in these places, they did so, according to Habermas, with the expectation that the only valid criterion of discussion was rational analysis and argument, and that what counted as the ultimate authority in the public sphere was the best rational argument (Habermas 1962: 31–43, 57–73, Mah 2000: 156–7).

These new venues of discussion, based solely on rational argument, constitute a momentous development for Habermas, the historical meaning of which I think has been somewhat underappreciated by commentators. Habermas’s theory of the emergence of a public sphere, of new venues of discussion in which the only authority is to be critical rational argument, is an idea that restates in more specific conceptual and institutional terms the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation.

When persons met in the eighteenth century in the way Habermas describes, they were in fact freeing themselves from traditional authorities, such as the authority of the state, religion and social groups (guilds, for example), all of which before then would have dictated opinion on the basis of some presumed, unquestioned, given authority. This traditional authority assumes that reason is was differential, allocated according to one’s social or corporate status. That discussion in new venues was no longer limited or defined by status or corporate membership meant that people now come to credit Habermas with no authority except that given by their own individual reason (1962: 36), and the new venues of the public sphere make this new principle operational and institutional. Habermas’s theory is thus a more precisely theorized and historically specific account of how the Enlightenment project was fulfilled, of how individuals, on the basis of their own reason, could liberate themselves from arbitrary irrational limitations, whether of belief or of institutions. The public sphere actualizes Kant’s famous description of the Enlightenment – it is, to paraphrase Kant, the concrete implementation of humanity’s emancipation from its self-imposed tutelage (1991: 54).1

The emancipation of the rational individual – what amounts to a radical individualism in relation to traditional authority – is one aspect of the public sphere; the other aspect, which also further empowers this individual, is that in coming together with other rational individuals, they are also affirming what is common to all of them. The emancipation of the autonomous rational person brings about, according to Habermas, a new, broader sense of collectivity that extends far beyond the established, intermediate, corporate groupings and institutions of eighteenth-century Europe. We see this remarkable and rather paradoxical double development in what I have argued is the strangest transformation of the public sphere, the rhetorical and conceptual transformation of the public sphere from a set of spaces or venues where rational individuals meet into a collective subject, a single unified entity, no longer just a public sphere but a public, whose interests are ultimately the interests of humanity at large (Mah 2000: 166–82).

The appearance and importance of the modern intellectual is entirely bound up with the emergence of the public sphere. In Habermas’s theory, we can see the figure of the modern intellectual appear in those who frequent the new venues and who publish criticism, initially of literature but then on other topics as well, including politics. What is characteristic of these critics is the same characteristic Habermas takes as definitive of the new public sphere – the liberation of rational reasoning from traditional authority. This independence from traditional authority has frequently been taken to be at its most radical in the eighteenth century during the French Enlightenment. Voltaire’s famous attack on the Catholic church, and his campaign against the arbitrary and inhumane legal practices of the French monarchy, Diderot’s publication of texts defying royal censorship which landed him in prison, Rousseau’s abandonment of aristocratic society which he saw as corrupting virtue and reason, these and other acts of defiant independence in the name of reason and a general humanity established the view that the modern intellectual must also be engagé.

Freed from traditional authority, the intellectual has a duty to be active in influencing public opinion, making the public aware of its own better interests, providing, as it were, the best argument. We can see a direct line from Voltaire’s campaign to find justice for the wronged and tortured Frenchman Jean Calas to Emile Zola’s campaign to exonerate the wronged Alfred Dreyfus and then to the twentieth-century explosion of intellectuals active in public causes: Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for Algerian independence, Bertrand Russell’s and E.P. Thompson’s campaigns for nuclear disarmament, Michel Foucault’s participation in the Prison Information Group of 1970s France.

The new figure of the modern intellectual in the public sphere, liberated and liberating others from fixed belief, representing the interests of reason and humanity in general, is a figure that became a prominent part of the political imaginary in the nineteenth century, given, at times, to remarkable exaggeration. Radical young Hegelians meeting in Berlin in the late 1830s and 1840s called for what one of them described as the ‘Terror of Pure Criticism’, criticism that recognized no boundaries and that would usher in a new society (Mah 1987). Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, offers us the figure of Bazarov, the nihilist, whose complete and detached reason frees him from all ties to traditional belief, family, even emotion. At the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Russian Marxism produced the Leninist view of a Bolshevik avant-garde that could free itself from Russia’s backward social conditions and drag the country into the future.

As soon as the image of the modern intellectual in a new public sphere emerged in the eighteenth century, it produced a deep anxiety on the right – in fact, this new image contributed to the emergence of an intellectual ‘right’ wing, a modern intellectual conservatism which defined itself precisely against the new intellectuals who could cut themselves off from tradition and authority. Edmund Burke (2001) attributed a key source of the violence of the French Revolution to the arrival of Enlightenment-inspired intellectuals. The rational independence of intellectuals became a standard trope of modern conservatism which describes that independence as an overbearing abstraction divorced from reality, at its best impractical and ridiculous, at its worst socially and politically dangerous.

The history of the intellectual in the public sphere can be written as a history of the vicissitudes of how that figure embodies the Enlightenment principle of emancipation, the liberation of the rational individual from social, political, and traditional limitations, a figure that over the last two and half centuries has been affirmed, exaggerated, dismissed, or feared. This would be the history of the modern intellectual in keeping with a quite straightforward view of the consolidation of Enlightenment reason in an expanding sphere. But in addition to this more obvious history, there is also another, one that elucidates the contradictions of the public sphere.

Social Particularity versus Public Sphere

As I argued in my earlier article, the public sphere that Habermas describes is in key respects fictional, an idealization of intellectual activity, in which one exercises impartial rational criticism and judgment by setting aside one’s social interests and background. People enter the public sphere, perhaps, to express their particular interests and concerns, but in the course of the discussion, they set aside those interests to manifest a more general reason, recognizing in each other that same trait that constitutes, as Habermas put it, ‘a parity of rational individuals’ (1962: 157).

This is the key primary transformation of people in the public sphere and it is imagined, in terms of a progress, as it were, an upward development from narrow social particularity or embeddedness to critical, universal, abstract rationality. This idea of a necessary progress is what I contend is the first fictional aspect in Habermas’s theory. It is an idealization of intellectual activity or, as we might also acknowledge, a projection of an ancient, Platonic model of intellectual transcendence onto the modern social world. Such a projection of rational transcendence is fictional, a phantasy of western philosophy, precisely because it is predicated on a denial of the inescapable fact of a social reality that always pre-exists it.

People, even the most rational, are always embedded in some social context, and that inescapable fact, coupled with the new norm of a progress to rational transcendence in the public sphere, produces numerous tensions and contradictions. In my earlier article, I talked about how some these contradictions could affect the legitimacy claims of social movements (Mah 2000: 160–6). The same kind of contradiction lies at the heart of the history of the intellectual in the modern public sphere. And those contradictions – the tensions between norm and social being – constitute in fact a kind of alternative history to the one I outlined above. We might in fact say that the projection of the image of the modern critical public intellectual goes hand-in-hand with an internecine conflict, a debate not just over specific doctrines, but over identity, over whether the intellectual is fulfilling or betraying a fundamental mission. This concerns not just their commitment to a particular cause but their general ability to exercise independent judgment in the first place.

Historians have often taken this approach in writing about some of the most honoured intellectuals. In a period crucial for the formation of modern reason, the Scientific Revolution, the gentlemen scientists of the British Royal Society trusted each other’s work, as Steven Shapin (1985) has argued, not because that work was ‘scientific’, that is, rigorously rational and empirical in a way we’d expect today, but because they recognized each other as gentlemen first. Here social class was the condition of possibility of intellectual recognition.

Whereas earlier commentators once considered the French Enlightenment, in Peter Gay’s words, a ‘party of Humanity’ (1963), challenging the status quo and beliefs of eighteenth-century France, the historian Robert Darnton (1982: 1–40) altered the historiography when he argued that the philosophes, once they became celebrated public figures formed a closed, privileged elite that kept out newcomers, except for the few whom they decided to cultivate as aristocratic patrons would their clients. Philosophes in the late Enlightenment, in other words, behaved exactly like the other closed, privileged corporations in the period. The philosophes sustained that closed system in their actions even as they might have criticized it in public.

Darnton’s views, we should point out, were already formulated in the French Enlightenment itself, by no less than its greatest representative, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Beginning with his 1750 Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau argued that not just civilization but the dissemination of knowledge in general corrupts, producing precisely a slavish immorality that the Enlightenment claimed to criticize.2

That new intellectuals both proclaimed the ideal of the public sphere, the supremacy of independent critical reasoning, while in crucial ways continuing to live and act in line with the traditional authorities, is a contradiction that also produced rather agonizing balancing acts, such as the one attempted by Habermas’s hero of Enlightenment reason: Immanuel Kant.

In his 1784 essay ‘What Is Enlightenment’, shortly after making his famous declaration about Enlightenment emancipation, Kant then seems to draw back from that ringing endorsement of Enlightenment emancipation. He engages in what we would today think are rather awkward intellectual acrobatics. Even as he is announcing in public the arrival of the Enlightenment, he must also confront the reality of being a university teacher in Königsberg, appointed and regulated by the Prussian state. Kant makes a key distinction in his essay. As a teacher he says, one is of course required to teach what the Prussian state requires, but as a scholar one has a different obligation, that is, to say what one actually believes to the general public. A ‘clergyman’, Kant’s writes (1991: 156), ‘must while he is in church give instruction in accordance with the doctrines of the Church’. ‘But’, Kant adds, ‘as a scholar he is completely free to and in fact obligated to impart to the public all the carefully considered thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those [same] religious doctrines’. (1991: 156). Say one thing when addressing a congregation in Church, then as a scholar publicly pronounce the same thing to be rationally mistaken – that is the curious logic of Kant’s distinction.

The problems for this distinction worsened after 1786, when a new, religiously more conservative monarch came to power in Prussia (Friedrich Wilhelm II) and the result was increased government censorship. Kant at this time collected a series of articles into a book on what was then called ‘natural religion’ which vindicated the allegorical and moral as opposed to literal meaning of the Bible. The book was censored, but through a legal loophole managed to be published. With the book’s publication, the government then threatened Kant with what it called ‘unpleasant consequences’ if he wrote anything more about religion.

We can see Kant’s response after 1798 when another monarch (Friedrich Wilhelm III) with more liberal views ascended to the throne. Kant then wrote another book, The Contest of the Faculties (1979), referring to university faculties. Here Kant argued for greater freedom for the philosophical faculty in the university, but he now also seemed to shy away from addressing the public sphere. Academic clergy, he now bluntly states, ‘are not free to make public use of their learning as they see fit, but are subject to the censorship of their faculty’.

In the debate over the divine origin of the Bible, those arguments, Kant writes, ‘must not be raised at all in public discussion directed to the people,’ which would ‘only get entangled in impertinent speculations and doubts’. Kant had in effect reverted to the traditional, corporate and absolutist system of differential reason, as he then concludes that on controversial issues ‘it is much safer to rely on the people’s confidence in their teachers’, (1979: 37, 47) who in Prussia, we should remember, were appointed and regulated by the central state.

These tensions, denunciations and compromises of intellectuals about the role of public intellectuals indicate, not that the idea of the modern intellectual is false in itself, but that there is a contradiction at the heart of the public sphere and therefore at the heart of its representative, the modern intellectual. The logic of the public sphere, its Enlightenment project that imagines an emancipation of reason from social constraints and traditional authority, that logic forgets that people, including intellectuals, are always enmeshed in social realities. Rousseau denounced his fellow philosophes because of that contradiction; Kant tried to reach a settlement with the Prussian authorities.

The contradiction is such that it is possible to question the integrity of an intellectual simply by pointing to their always-existing social embeddedness. Supposedly through intellectual effort alone, one is to transcend one’s social class or the stereotypes of one’s gender or any other social condition – perhaps. Or perhaps, those conditions exert an influence of which one is not fully aware. And even if one leaves one’s particular class, for example, one always enters another class – even if it then appears to be a ‘class’ of intellectuals. As their own class, intellectuals will have particular economic interests and predetermined points of view, all of which seem to undercut any claim to social independence.

Hegel considered this ‘intellectual’ class to be the modern bureaucracy, which, emerging from other classes to work for a universal state, would set aside narrow, particularist concerns (1967: 131–140; Mah 1987: 25–31). But in the ensuing history of the modern bureaucracy, many have criticized that institution for precisely becoming an interest group and a parasite on the rest of society. We see this concern being played out right now, in the United States for example, as state governments, such as that of Wisconsin, excavate the collective bargaining rights of public workers.

The contradiction between an intellectual’s claims to intellectual independence from society and the fact of their inevitable social embeddedness led the young Karl Marx in his move away from Hegelianism in the 1840s to turn this in-built tension in the modern intellectual into a full-blown theory of ideology. Marx accused his former friends and teachers of holding certain philosophical views because those seemingly abstract views were, consciously or not, ultimately in the service of an existing class and state (Mah 1987: 201–2). That the most seemingly rational, systematic, self-generated and impartial of ideas co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction New Public Spheres: Recontextualizing the Intellectual
• PART I: HISTORY AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS
• PART II: THE INTERNET AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
• PART III: WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
• PART IV: SUBCULTURES IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
• Index