Summary of Parts 2 and 3 (“Social Structures of the Public Sphere” and “Political Functions of the Public Sphere”)
Habermas begins the second part of his book with a “basic blueprint” of the bourgeois public sphere. He positions the sphere intermediate between two poles. On one side are civil society and the conjugal family, which mean the market spaces and domestic spaces of a society. On the other side are the state and the court, populated by the police and administrators. Although the public sphere is therefore between the society of citizens and the state of a nation, Habermas calls the public sphere, paradoxically, “private.” This is because it is made up of private citizens, rather than the public officials of a state or court. The “public authority” belongs solely to the state and courts. The “private realm” includes civil society, families, and the public sphere in which they both participate.
Habermas then goes on to describe, historically, the development of this public sphere, that is, the creation of spaces in which private citizens could come together to debate and discuss the world. Central to his account is the rise, in the 1600s, of towns and other urban centers that concentrate more and more citizens in a single place, so that it is physically possible for there to be lots of discussion. Slowly, over the course of the 17th century, the town had replaced the royal court as the site of public discussion. Within a town, Habermas pays special attention to the institution of the coffee house or tea parlor, in which the upper middle classes of a society would come together, meet one another, and engage in conversation. Such a café or salon is a prototype of the public sphere.
There are three main attributes or functions that the institutions of the bourgeois public sphere, including the café, have in common. The first is that what mattered in the discussions held there were not who was speaking but what was being said. It didn’t matter if you were from a particular family, for instance, but whether your argument was the best one possible. This is in sharp contrast to the monarchy, based on blood, or the courts, based on nobility. Second, the kinds of discussion had there ventured into new topics outside traditional discourses. This is in sharp contrast to the Church, for instance, which primarily discusses the scriptures and their interpretation. In the new public sphere, any topic was theoretically up for grabs. Finally, these public sphere institutions were, at least in theory, universally accessible. Anyone could walk into a café and join the conversation—a sharp contrast to religious and royal institutions.
As a public sphere emerged at the borderland between society and the state, some institutions that had previously been tied to the state started to become independent. Habermas pays particular attention to literature, music, and theatre. In the past, literature had been highly tied to religion, and music and theatre were rarely for casual entertainment. Instead, performances were “occasional,” which means they were for a special occasion like a religious holiday or a royal coronation. There was no literature or theatre of everyday life, and certainly none made by and for the layman. Over the course of the late 1600s and early 1700s, this changed, as art began to associate more with private citizens than with public states or courts. At the same time, new discourses of art history emerged in which private citizens could engage in critical discussion of literature and theatre. All this art criticism is part of the new public sphere.
As the public sphere emerged, Habermas notes it responded with particular urgency to the needs of the family. By 1750, the family has developed a contradictory nature. On the one hand, discourses of “true love” made the family seem like a space of irrational freedom: you could choose whom you wanted to marry based on whom you loved. This expressed a human side of life, the sense of being guided by one’s emotions rather than by external pressures or laws. But the family still depended on the economy to function. People weren’t, in reality, completely free, because they still had to act rationally in an economy. Art, in turn, became important to help manage this contradiction, of people seeing themselves as both free, emotionally-driven human beings and rational economic actors. One way of doing this was through developing new kinds of intimacy even within the marketplace, for instance through letter-writing. This century saw the rise of “epistolary novels” or novels which were composed of letters. These novels mirrored on a "public" scale the intimacy of letter-writing, creating a new kind of intimacy between authors and readers.
The rise of letter-writing and the rise of the novel both demonstrate a new interest on the part of the bourgeoisie in the psychology of other individuals. In a public sphere, remember, private citizens who are different from one another come together to discuss a topic. This led people to be interested in the private lives of other individuals. Why did someone think or feel a certain way? Novels facilitate new kinds of self-reflection on the human condition as well as empathy for humans who are different from you. With this new realization that everyone is different but equal at the same time—everyone has a different opinion, but everyone is human—society began to develop more general and universal laws. A law had to be applicable to everyone, even though everyone was different.
In the third section of his book, Habermas explores the new political functions of the public sphere as well. He says Great Britain was the first country to develop a political public sphere, in the form of Parliament, at the turn of the 18th century. What makes a political public sphere is that what matters within are its members' opinions, rather than, for example, whether they come from royal families. Parliament was not something people inherited, like nobility; rather, people were elected into Parliament because other people voted in agreement with their opinions. In turn, this political public sphere was not supposed to be a space of domination or hierarchy. So, too, did constitutions spell out the autonomy of the private sphere, which was supposed to be free of coercion from the state. In the public sphere, private citizens were supposed to be able to present their arguments until people came to a consensus on what was best for the good of all. What mattered is that everyone would agree on the best argument based on reason, rather than picking the viewpoint of the richest or most royal person.
Of course, as Habermas goes on to discuss, this principle of “universal access” was never completely realized. People had to believe that the public sphere was accessible to all—that anyone could participate in the rational debate—in order to believe there was no coercion and that the best argument would always win. But because the public sphere was modeled after the bourgeois reading public—the people who read and wrote art criticism, for instance, as discussed in the previous part—it implicitly excluded people from other classes. To vote and to serve in Parliament, you had to be literate and own property. That means the franchise, as well as the political public sphere, was always limited and exclusive even as it relied upon the fantasy of being open to all. Still, this was a new kind of accessibility. When institutions are based on birth, there’s nothing to do to get access if you’re from the wrong bloodline. But when institutions are based on education and property, there may be a little bit more in your control to gain access, at least if you are male and white.
Analysis of Parts 2 and 3 (“Social Structures of the Public Sphere” and “Political Functions of the Public Sphere”)
That Habermas begins with a “blueprint” of the public sphere suggests its spatial dimensions. Indeed, the idea of a “sphere” suggests that the public is in a particular place. However, it is important not to understand the public sphere in purely spatial terms. Although some institutions of the public sphere, like the coffee house, were actual places people came together to converse, the public sphere is more than just a sum of places. Rather, the public sphere is characterized by pathways of communication. This is why letter writing is as much the public sphere as the café. So instead of looking for public sphere places, Habermas is actually asking us to look for public sphere actions, in particular forms of communication and dialogue that spur critical debate.
In a similar vein, it is difficult to overstate the importance of how arguments in the public sphere began to take priority over the people speaking them. Once again, it is actions that matter more than anything else, including who is doing the action. This sets the stage for the liberal idea that all men are created equal and should be given equal opportunity regardless of their birthright. Habermas is saying that this liberal idea did not come out of nowhere, as if some political philosopher sat down and theorized liberalism all by himself. Rather, it emerged from a set of seemingly-spontaneous practices, as people naturally began to associate and debate with one another.
A surprising finding of these chapters is that the political dimensions of the public sphere seem to develop after the cultural dimensions. It is like people learned how to engage politics by first learning how to talk about art and literature. This adds a new twist to the economic nature of Habermas’s arguments. While Habermas thinks that capitalism sets the stage for the public sphere, because of the ways in which it requires citizens to interact directly with one another instead of with the king or the Church, he does not hold a classical Marxist view. Marxism would hold that the economic structure of a society completely determines the cultural and political structures of a society. By constrast, Habermas seems to think there is some relative autonomy to the cultural sphere. In the cultural sphere, people learn new habits of interaction that in turn inform the political sphere.
In turn, underneath Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, these chapters also offer a theory of Western culture. In particular, Habermas has surprising insights into what has come to be called the “rise of the novel.” In English, Ian Watt began modern scholarship into this area when he published The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in 1957. Written only five years later, Habermas’s book suggests its own theory for the rise of the novel. Unlike myths, which tell the stories of gods, novels tell the stories of everyday people. They do so by looking at their psychology: what motivates someone to do something in a particular situation. Habermas suggests this kind of storytelling became particularly important only when society itself became organized around the idea that everyday people, not just kings, mattered, and their opinions were worth exploring.
In summary, then, Habermas is synchronizing multiple different histories in this chapter. One is an economic history, or how capitalism develops in modernity. Another is political history, especially the rise of political institutions like Parliament that replace the royal institutions like the monarchy and aristocratic court. There is also a cultural history, in terms of the rise and fall of different art forms and genres. And what holds all these histories together, their common thread, is the history of the public, as it comes of age, as it learns to read, and as it facilitates critical debate. This is the power of Habermas’s book: that in telling the story of the public sphere, he is able to tell the story of many other things as well.
