Parsing Habermas's "Bourgeois Public Sphere"

Ongoing debate over the early history of the public sphere provides a good index of the fruitfulness of the category. When did it come into being? How inclusive was it? The very heat of controversy on local problems associated with the category of the public sphere seems to confirm widespread accord that the category itself has become indispensable to historical understanding. This distinction between local debates on the details and general agreement on the category may be illusory, however, since often enough debates seem to be fueled by fundamentally different views of what Habermas means by the public sphere. This being the case, the problem of chronology may best be addressed through a brief effort to clarify the meaning of Habermas's phrase Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, commonly translated as bourgeois public sphere.

Bourgeois. As Habermas's translator informs us, Bürgerliche might be rendered either as bourgeois or as civil.¹ His decision to use the former term has had the effect of suggesting, at least to an Anglophone audience, that the public sphere was a self-consciously class phenomenon. This is no doubt true to the spirit of Habermas's central concern in his study, which is not the initial formation of the category but its "structural transformation" in the later nineteenth century, when the public sphere was a feature of an unambiguously "bourgeois society." But class terminology, however relevant it may be to the historical analysis of early modern England, is not relevant to the way early modern English people understood themselves: consciousness of class is an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century development. True, Habermas would have us see the emergence of class consciousness and the emergence of the public sphere as intertwined developments. Indeed, the history of the public sphere—unlike that, say, of agricultural technology—is coextensive with matters of consciousness: to ask how people came to inhabit the public sphere is the same thing as asking how people came to think of themselves as inhabiting the public sphere. But the choice of the term bourgeois rather than civil risks encouraging readers to project onto the opening chapters of the book an overly stabilized conception of the emergent public sphere as already bourgeois in a historically more developed sense of the term. By the same token, the focus on bourgeois society displaces attention from a crucial, and presumably less familiar, aspect of Habermas's argument, the emergence of civil society. By the end of the eighteenth century, he writes, "the elements of political prerogative [had] developed into organs of public authority: partly into a parliament, and partly into judicial organs. Elements of occupational status group organization ... [had] developed into the sphere of 'civil society' that as the genuine domain of private autonomy stood opposed to the state" (12). The nascent opposition between the privacy of civil society and the publicness of the state is both an analogue and a foundation for the division between the public sphere and the public realm as such: "the bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor" (27). In other words, just as the public state coalesced over against the private realm of civil society, so, within that private realm, private people came together as a public sphere that was distinct both from other spheres of privacy and from the realm of public authority which they came together to criticize. Neglected by the language of "bourgeois" society, the status of the public sphere as a dialectical mediation between the modern realms of the public and the private—as a marker both of their unprecedented separation out from each other and of their capacity to be brought into relation—is thrown into relief by the language of "civil" society. The public sphere names the place where the citizen confronts the state in his or her own terms, the place of...