The Bourgeois Public Sphere and the Concept of Literature

Jürgen Habermas's conceptualization of a bourgeois public sphere has recently exerted a powerful influence in literary studies. This produces the concomitant desire to stretch the concept over a broader range than Habermas himself proposed, which was roughly the period beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. In the case of Renaissance studies, this has produced a salutary emphasis on the role of Protestantism and print culture in anticipating the bourgeois public sphere.¹ The English Renaissance indeed possesses a public sphere: pulpit, print, theater. Whether these proliferating media of public discussion constitute a bourgeois public sphere is another question. The application of Habermas's terms to the Renaissance tends to produce a significant change: public sphere in the place of a bourgeois public sphere. The bourgeois public sphere of the eighteenth century is founded on the circumscription of both religion and aristocratic protocol, producing a cultural space, civil society, that persons entered as neither subjects nor worshipers. In English history, this double circumscription rests on the political and cultural settlement of the revolutions of the seventeenth century: limited monarchy and politically marginalized religion. Its contours were shaped in a complicated reaction to what James Holstun has described as "the revolutionary public sphere" of Civil War and Interregnum England.²

Habermas differentiates between the forms of publicity that might be said to characterize the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, to use the normative periods in English literary studies. For Habermas, aristocratic power required the publicity of self-representation. Monarchs and their peerage "represented their lordship not for but 'before' the people."³ This cynosure of representational self-display radiated throughout the society, so that the terms Habermas uses to characterize aristocratic representation can be easily extended to a larger discursive network: "The staging of the publicity involved in representation was wedded to personal attributes such as insignia (badges and arms), dress (clothing and coiffure), demeanor (form of greeting and poise) and rhetoric (form of address and formal discourse in general)—in a word, to a strict code of 'noble' conduct" (8). In general, rhetorical self-display, often combined with a keen sense of the niceties of hierarchy, dominated all forms of writing in the period. At the same time, the poetry and, particularly, the drama of the Renaissance increasingly insist on the crisis of this form of representation—one might think of King Lear in this regard. This crisis ultimately precipitates a bourgeois public sphere in England, but that moment awaits a political—and cultural—revolution.

The development of a bourgeois public sphere requires more than public discussion; it demands a fundamental shift in the conditions of public discourse. Habermas articulates this shift in terms of the new assertion of individuals who had remained merely private in the older dispensation: "The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public" (27). This emphasis on the significance of the private nature of the individuals constituting this public dominates the early sections of Habermas's account, which outline the preconditions of a bourgeois public sphere, and it is here that Habermas signals his indebtedness to, and revision of, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, first published in 1958. In that remarkable study, Arendt elegizes the former integrity of the public world of the Greek polis, which was achieved through the rigorous subordination of the private world of the household, defined by its association with women and slaves. The loss of the demarcation between the two is for Arendt characteristic of the modern world, almost inevitably degrading public life, and this would seem to be borne out in spectacular fashion in the American politics of recent years. Arendt's concept of "the social," the new public relevance of that which was once shrouded in privacy, is her name for what in the modern world replaces and indeed contradicts the Greek concept of the political.⁴ Habermas revises Arendt's account to produce a very different evaluation of what Arendt terms the social, or the new public relevance of that which was formerly merely private. The concept of...