The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is Jürgen Habermas’s seminal theory and history of the “public sphere” in Western societies, especially France, Germany, and England. Historically, it tracks the changing social and political conception of the “public” from the Renaissance through the present. Theoretically, it provides an account of what the public sphere is and should be as a mediator between private individuals and the state.
In the Introduction, Habermas tells us the pre-history of the public sphere. He notes that during medieval times, most Western civilizations were completely under the power of the king. Thus, there was no such thing as a public sphere separate from state authority. In contrast, over the course of the Renaissance, the king lost his monopoly over the public. This was in large part because of the rise of mercantile capitalism, or economies based on trade, which required citizens to know what was going on in other places. As people began to share news and trade directly with one another, instead of the economy being controlled by the king, a public sphere emerged. Because it was associated with the trade of the middle classes, rather than the labor of the working classes or the aristocracy of the noble classes, Habermas calls this the “bourgeois” public sphere.
A number of institutions emerged to facilitate this new bourgeois public sphere in the 1600s and 1700s, as Habermas explains in Chapters 2 and 3. Cafes and journals provided spaces and forums for private citizens to discuss the affairs of the day independent from official state places like the court or palace. In these public spaces, what mattered were the arguments made rather than the people who spoke them. This is in opposition to something like monarchy, based on a bloodline. Thus, the new public sphere was, ideally, democratic and open to anyone, as long as you had an education. These spaces also developed political functions. People began to discuss, among themselves, the way in which the state should be run. This led to private citizens making demands on their state, rather than being controlled by the state like in feudalism.
In Chapter 4, Habermas discusses the philosophy behind this public sphere. He shows how, from the Renaissance to the the 18th century, philosophers including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau helped to develop a concept of the public. The essentially bourgeois idea of the public sphere achieved its major philosophical statement in the 18th century work of Immanuel Kant, who tied morality to legislation. Here, the state should be run according to a moral view based on the universality of mankind. Any law should apply equally to any human. As 19th century critics like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx pointed out, however, this universalism was technically impossible. For Marx, this was because the “universal human being” would always really be identified with those who had the most cultural power in a society, which in the 1800s were the bourgeois middle class. Thus, “public opinion” was not the opinion of everyone in a society; it was really just bourgeois opinion.
Chapters 5 and 6 of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere concern the fate of the public sphere from the 1800s to the present. Habermas says that the ideal of the public sphere quickly eroded. The watershed moment came with the economic crises of the late 1800s. States became more involved in the economy, controlling trade across international borders in order to protect marketplaces at home. This kind of “interventionism” meant that the previously private sphere of people trading directly with one another was no longer separate from the state, and in turn, the public sphere composed of private individuals also began to wither. In the 20th century, this has been exacerbated by the rise of the mass media, which politicians use to manipulate the public rather than involve them in critical discussion. Now, people consume the “illusion” of publicity on the radio and television, but they are not a part of actual critical discussions of how the state should be run. To fix this situation and resurrect the ideal of a public sphere that holds the state accountable, Habermas argues that Western societies need to limit government secrecy and find new forms of “universal interest” that can unite the public together.
