HABERMAS PUBLIC SPHERE

 By Lawrence Sunday Ogwang

Who is Habermas?

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism or practicality. He was born on the 18 June 1929. He is one of the most important German philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. His work addresses communicative sagacity or rationality and the public sphere.

 In his scholarly life, he preoccupied himself with the question what power do the public have to influence the government in a democratic state? As he grappled with this, as a result, he came out with the idea of public sphere.

What is public sphere?

The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals
can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. Such a discussion is called public debate and is defined as the expression of views on matters that are of concern to the public—often, but not always, with opposing or diverging views being expressed by participants in the discussion.

Public debate takes place mostly through the mass media, but also at meetings or through social media, academic publications and government policy documents.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere  

According to Habermas however, the public sphere is an integral part of democracy, a social space in which private citizens can engage in debates pertinent to the public without influence from the state since it can also participate in the debate. It is an access between public life and civil society

Three countries were famous according to him in relation to the public sphere and the the respective place where it is conducted.

France (Saloons)

Britain (Coffee shops or houses)

Germany (Table societies)

 It is a concept very central in the study of media because of the idea that the media plays the role of facilitator of democracy and supplying the public with equal access to information and equal opportunity to participate in public debate.

He says, the very success of the public sphere depends upon the vigorous rational critical debate in which everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and convince everyone about the strength of their argument.

Habermas dates the formation of the terms of public sphere and public opinion back to the 18th century through the growth of coffee houses, literary and other societies, voluntary associations, and the growth of the press. In their efforts to discipline the state, parliament and other agencies of representative government sought to manage this public sphere.

Before the rise of the Bourgeoisie and the creation of bourgeois public spheres the understanding of the term ‘public’ was quite different. Before that time the representation of authority through a lord was called ‘public’ referring to the public representation lords were seen as. This public representation was merely stating their authorities before the people than for the people they governed.

Although the basic concept of representation through a government or head of state remained, the attachment to aristocracy was discarded over time. By the end of the 18th century the feudal powers of church and nobility diminished paving the way for the rise of a bourgeois society in Europe. With it the meaning of the word ‘public’ changed as well.

‘Public’ no longer described the representative court of a person and their authority. It came to mean the legitimizing regulations of an established system that held governing powers. Citizens were now subsumed or incorporated under the state forming the public.

Habermas defines the public sphere as a "society engaged in critical public debate". Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas:

• The formation of public opinion
• All citizens have access.
• Conference in unrestricted fashion (based on the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association, the freedom to expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general interest, which implies freedom from economic and political control.
• Debate over the general rules governing relations.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour

In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called "institutional criteria" (official standards) as preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere.

Ø  Disregard of status: Preservation of "a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. ... Not that this idea of the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, salons, and the societies; but as an idea, it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If not realized, it was at least consequential.

Ø  Domain of common concern: "...discussion within such a public presupposed the problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned. The domain of 'common concern' which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation.

The private people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in its implicitness for so long could assert its authority."

Ø  Inclusivity: However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who – insofar as they were propertied and educated as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion.

The issues discussed became 'general' not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. ... Wherever the public established itself institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator – the new form of bourgeois representation"

To Habermas, The success of the public sphere depends upon:

• the extent of access (as close to universal as possible),
• the degree of autonomy (the citizens must be free of coercion),
• the rejection of hierarchy (so that each might participate on an equal footing),
• the rule of law (particularly the subordination of the state),
• The quality of participation (the common commitment to the ways of logic).

This success of the public sphere was founded on rational-critical discourse-everyone is an equal participant and the supreme communication skill is the power of argument.

Ø  However, Habermas himself had to admit that the participation of women and the inclusion of minorities is not guaranteed by his model relying on the circumstances of bourgeois society in the early 19th century.

This is however not far from what the bourgeois public sphere holds. The bourgeois public sphere required as preconditions of entry an excellent education and property ownership – which correlated to membership of the upper classes.

Critics have argued that the bourgeois public sphere cannot be considered an ideal form of politics, since the public sphere was limited to upper-class strata of society and did not represent most of the citizens in these emerging nation-states.

This invited many feminist critics towards the public sphere model of Habermas in his Structural Transformation of the public sphere (1962) translated into English by Lawrence Fredrick and Thomas B. (1989)

One of the leading critics is Nancy Fraser born May 20, 1947, an American critical theorist, feminist, and Professor of Political and Social Science and philosophy at The New School in New York City. She is one of the 20^th C. philosopher.

v  In her arguments she says there should be a rethinking of the public sphere where dominance and exclusion are unheard of. Nancy Fraser offers a feminist revision of Habermas' historical description of the public sphere, and confronts it with "recent revisionist historiography". When she argues that the bourgeois public sphere was in fact constituted by a "number of significant exclusions." In contrast to Habermas’ assertions on disregard of status and inclusivity, Fraser claims that the bourgeois public sphere discriminated against women and other historically marginalized groups: ".

v  Secondly, she argues that Bracketing of inequalities should cease: Fraser makes us recall that "the bourgeois conception of the public sphere requires bracketing inequalities of status". The "public sphere was to be an arena in which debaters would set aside such characteristics as a difference in birth and fortune and speak to one another as if they were social and economic peers". Such bracketing usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in society and to the disadvantage of subordinates."

v  The problematic definition of "common concern": Nancy Fraser points out that "there are no naturally given, a priori boundaries" between matters that are generally conceived as private, and ones we typically label as public (i.e. of "common concern").

Actors in the Public Sphere

The public—the traditional understanding of the public refers to an imaginary group of people that are connected through their mutual interest in one or several issues of public concern. The members of the public need not be located in the same place. In contemporary social science, the term is often equated with politically relevant groups of citizens, for instance the electorate, civil society, local communities, or mass media audiences.

Civil society—civil society and the public are closely related, but conceptually not synonymous. Civil society is constituted by organizations and activities that have no primary political or commercial character, and are not motivated by profit or power. Under certain circumstances they can become part of the public sphere.

Public officials—the state is not a part of the public sphere, but it has the capacity, and even the obligation, to be an actor in the public sphere. In the democratic public sphere, public authorities listen to the public and determine the public will, communicate their own issues and positions, and provide information about decisions and actions.

The media—the mass media “have central significance in the creation of an institutional infrastructure enabling the organization of the general interest both nationally and internationally.”  In addition to providing communication channels, the mass media also can set agenda, introduce and shape topics of public discussion.

Private actors—when private citizens or corporations enter the public sphere, they usually do so to promote private or public interests. In the latter case, they become part of the public.

Some critics claim the public sphere, as such, never existed, or existed only in the sense of excluding many important groups, such as the poor, women, slaves, migrants, and criminals. They maintain that the public sphere remains an idealized conception, little changed since Kant, since the ideal is still to a great extent what Habermas might call an unfinished project of modernity.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Habermas considers the public sphere to be in decline due to what he terms as the refeudalisation of power whereby the public now includes powerful organizations that institutionally exert their influence on the public sphere.

REFERENCE

Habermas, J., (1962). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. (Accessed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere on the 7th Sept 2019)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Fraser (Accessed on the 10th Sept 2019).

Habermas, J., (1992), "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere", in Calhoun, Craig (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge Mass.: MIT press ISBN 978-0-262-53114-6. (Accessed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere on the 7th Sept 2019)

Habermas, J., (1989). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopaedia Article. In Critical theory and Society. A Reader, ed. (Accessed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere on the 11th Sept 2019)