The Private vs. the Public
Part of the ambition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is to track how notions of the private and the public change over time in Western nations. In the 1800s, the bourgeois public sphere was actually a part of the private realm, because the public sphere was made up of private individuals communicating with one another about art and politics. On the other side of the public sphere are the “public authorities,” such as the state and the courts, which are not a part of the public sphere but are objects of critique by the public sphere. Eventually, by the 1900s, however, the state begins to co-opt the public sphere for its own purposes. It also begins to infiltrate the private realms of the economy and the family through protectionist policies that control markets and welfare policies that manage families. Over the course of the history Habermas relates, we see that the private and public are never entirely distinct, but cross into each other in different ways depending on the historical period.
The Feudal and Refeudalization
A feudal society is one in which the state—or the king in charge of the state—has completely saturated society, controlling everything from property to relationships between individuals. The bourgeois public sphere at first emerges in sharp contrast to such a system, because there is a separate private realm in which individuals and families participate in commerce and intimacy without interference from the state. But Habermas shows that this period, which is simultaneous with the bourgeois public sphere of the early 1800s, is short-lived. By the end of the 1800s, states begin to intervene in the economy and to manage families through public assistance policies, all of which shows the state is once again involved in private matters. This second wave of state control is what Habermas calls “refeudalization.”
Access vs. Criticality
One tension Habermas notes in the public sphere has to do with who gets to participate in it. Ideally, the public sphere is supposed to be open to everyone. Anyone can participate, in contrast to an institution like the monarchy, which you have to be born into. But at first, the public sphere was really only open to the middle classes, or those who had property and were educated. It was under such conditions that the critical dimension of the public sphere, its function in facilitating debate over current affairs, thrived. Because everyone had a common language, it was easy to have rigorous debate on universally-accepted terms. As the 19th century progressed, the public sphere became less exclusive. But this widening of the sphere also meant there were fewer things everyone had in common in the public sphere, and in turn, there were fewer topics of universal conversation. The public sphere seems to require a trade-off between universal access and universal criticality.
Displayed vs. Critical
As Habermas’s analysis enters the 20th century, he looks at the changing role of publicity in politics. In the age of mass media, he thinks the public sphere is no longer a space of critical debate. Rather, the state merely manufactures messages that it sends to citizens as if they were customers waiting to buy, rather than debate, a product. Habermas calls this new form of politics “displayed” because it is about staging the illusion of publicness without actually facilitating public dialogue. This is the central question in the public sphere today: whether a critical dimension can be recovered to contest the displays of illusory publicness staged by the state.
Liberalism vs. Social Welfare
Under liberalism, which Habermas associates with the bourgeois public sphere, there is a relative distinction between the private sphere and the state. The private sphere includes the market and the family, and the state is supposed to leave it alone. But under the pressures of economic depressions in the late 1800s, Habermas notes the state began to intervene into the economy. In turn, it also began to intervene into the family through developing welfare programs in which private individuals rely on state assistance. This kind of social welfare state destroys the earlier distinction between private and public realms, and in turn, it also destroys the public sphere that used to negotiate between them.
Publicity vs. Secrecy
A tension that Habermas tracks throughout his historical survey is between publicity and secrecy. At first, the public sphere was supposed to get rid of secrets, by making formerly elusive matters like the royal court open to public discussion and debate. This was a way of holding the state accountable to the needs of private citizens. Now, however, Habermas thinks there is a reversal in the age of mass media. Secret interest groups now use publicity to sell their political platforms. Publicity becomes a tool of secrecy, rather than its opposite.
Family vs. Society
In the age of the bourgeois public sphere, the family is in the private realm along with the economy. How people engage in commerce and how people raise their families are both private affairs, protected from state intervention. But as the state begins to intervene in the economy in the late 19th century, families, too, become enmeshed and lose their autonomy. Soon, members of a family are influenced directly by society or the state through public education and social norms rather than being raised exclusively by their familial ideologies. Thus, the relation between family and society at large is another key index of transformations in the public sphere.
