Summary of Part 5 (“ The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”)
In the previous three chapters, Habermas has laid out the structural and philosophical development of the public sphere from the 1500s to the 1800s. Now, in this chapter, he spells out how this public sphere has transformed from the mid-1800s to the present. His insight is that the bourgeois public sphere as originally understood was actually short-lived. Remember that the public sphere was intermediate between “society,” which included businesses and families, and the “state,” which included the police, courts, and other government bodies. The state was the space of public authority, and the public sphere was the means by which private society held it accountable and critiqued it. Originally, then, the public sphere was controlled by and belonged to private citizens. Beginning in the late 19th century, however, the state slowly took over the public sphere and used it to its own purposes.
Habermas says this process began with economic depressions in the 1870s. Before the depression, Europe enjoyed relatively free trade across borders. After the depression, however, states began to intervene in the economy through protectionist policies that strengthened the borders separating nations. This state control of the flow of goods, in order to maximize the profits in the exchange of imports and exports, is called “neomercantalism,” referring to a renaissance of controlling merchant trade. Its effect is what Habermas calls a “refeudalization” of society, or a return to state control of assets. In this situation, people do not just trade with one another, but have to go through the state, just as in feudal times, property belonged to lords and eventually the monarchy. A vertical axis of power, with society subordinated to the state, replaces a horizontal exchange of goods among private actors.
This has immediate consequences for the public sphere. Remember that in the period of the bourgeois public sphere, the economy was supposed to be a private sphere in which individuals enjoyed free markets. In turn, the market was supposed to be an even playing field: no one would gain control over someone else, like a lord over a peasant, because competition, rather than hierarchy, was the rule. When states start intervening into the economy, however, new power dynamics are introduced. For instance, monopolies can be formed that concentrate wealth and goods into a small segment of the economy. Thus, private society becomes increasingly unequal, as power and commodities are no longer freely distributed. Importantly, Habermas is not saying that society was actually egalitarian in the early 19th century and becomes unequal by the end. Rather, it was possible for people to believe or fantasize that society was egalitarian earlier, because of the ideology of the free market. Once states start intervening in the market, this fantasy is no longer possible to sustain.
At the same time that the state got involved in the market, introducing new inequalities, it also got involved in a lot of other private things, too. For instance, the state itself became a producer of goods. It also began to offer public services. It got involved in private law by settling contractual disputes between private individuals. In all these ways, state power became spread out into more and more domains previously thought of as private. Most important was the state’s involvement in the family. In the bourgeois model of the public sphere, families are private entities that care for themselves. But as class inequality increased with state intervention in the market, the state had to begin to offer different kinds of assistance. This saw the rise of social welfare, as states began to support the families that had been shut out of economic prosperity.
Soon, Habermas says, European societies saw the “polarization of the social sphere and the intimate sphere.” Under the bourgeois model, the economy (the social sphere) and the family (the intimate sphere) were in the same private realm together. Families cared for themselves while also participating in the market to support themselves. Now, the sphere of the family is divorced from the sphere of labor. A further consequence of this is that families no longer have complete control over “personal internalization,” which means, among other things, how children are raised and what a family believes. Now, people are influenced by social norms at large or state ideologies that the family does not control. Habermas points to an architectural correspondence to bring this point home. In urban settings in particular, homes are no longer private and self-enclosed, but crowded and opened up to the wider world. Just like their homes and apartments, the family no longer turns in on itself, but is opened to external influence.
This transformation of the private sphere influenced the make-up of the public sphere. In particular, a critical public sphere of private individuals debating and arguing together went away. Instead of debating culture, people begin to “consume” culture. You watch a theatre show not to discuss it in a critical way, but to say that you went to see it. In the world of literature, the mass marketing of paperbacks similarly indicates people consuming culture rather than really absorbing and discussing it. In the bourgeois public sphere, people might write letters about books they had read, in order to interpret their experiences of the world and share them with others.
What mattered was the exchange of letters more than the book itself. But now, this flourishing of communication has narrowed. The demise of communication has only intensified in the development of mass media forms like the radio or television. In a mass media world, people consume a lot of culture in great volumes, but there is rarely space leftover for critical discussion. This isn’t to say there aren’t people who study culture, such as professors and professional critics, but they are usually isolated from the society as a whole. They also speak an educated language that the rest of society has not been trained in. Thus there is another “polarization,” this time with “minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly” on one side and “the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical” on the other. Critical debate is isolated. Consumption is public but not discussed. The masses receive media, but do not participate in it.
Analysis of Part 5 (“ The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”)
In Chapter 1, the rise of capitalism reorganized feudalism and set the stage for the rise of the public sphere. Chapter 5 charts almost the reverse course: economic changes led to a re-feudalization in the late 1800s that closed the curtain on the public sphere. It is important to understand that this refeudalization refers specifically to how the state monopolized the public sphere. It does not mean the return to the monarchy or the return of lords. Refeudalism refers, for Habermas, only to the return of the model for the public under feudalism, not to any of its other properties. But it is, nonetheless, a regression, according to Habermas. Now, states are not held accountable by a public sphere, just as a king under feudalism might have had impunity to do whatever he pleased.
Notice that the destruction of the public sphere happens in reverse order from its construction. According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere first arose out of private citizens who were engaging in commerce with each other. The public sphere then became a means of holding the public authorities of a state accountable to the will of the people. Now, the state first takes over the public sphere and, in turn, take over the private sphere as well. This is what Habermas means by the social welfare state, in which domestic relations are managed as well as economic ones. Once the state takes over the public sphere, there is no private sphere left either.
All this goes to show how the different realms in the society of the bourgeois public sphere depended on one another. The private realm required a distinct public authority in order to delimit, or mark the boundaries, of what privacy was. So there were three spheres—the private sphere of families and trade, the public sphere of debate, and the public authorities of the state—and each one had an identity based on the others. Once one of these takes over the other, the whole system loses integrity and you don’t know how to separate things anymore. This shows how fragile the whole system was to begin with.
Because the previous chapters linked cultural to political history, it is worth noting here shifts in culture paralle shifts in politics. The bourgeois public sphere was characterized by reciprocity and exchange; letter-writing, for instance, was like a dialogue. Cultural forms like the novel similarly allowed for intimate relations between readers and characters. Today, the mass media are the dominant form and they do not allow dialogue or reciprocal relations. Mass media is closer to preaching to its audience rather than facilitating a conversation with it. But lest we think that the media are driving the change in the public sphere—which, remember, was first transformed because of the economic intervention of the state—we should remember that people enjoy being preached at, or enjoy consuming mass media. This is part of the problem. It’s not just that people are living unhappily under a totalitarian state. Much more perniciously, it is that people are being deprived of a democratic voice but don’t even seem to mind.
At the end of Chapter 5, Habermas bemoans the split between the general and the specialist public. This is an ironic point, because Habermas himself, as an academic, belongs to a kind of specialist public. People aren’t picking up The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in the checkout line at the supermarket. There is the suggestion that, if people were doing that, then part of the problem might be solved. In this way, there is some melancholy in Habermas’s writing, as he almost recognizes that he is writing a book that will not be read because of the very problem the book is about. But this also suggests the need for scholars to become “public intellectuals” as well, or to not be so isolated in their areas of specialty. How to be both critical of the public and participating in the public is the major task that needs to be figured out.
