Phantasies of the public sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of historians

Journal of Modern History

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 153-182

  Mah, Harold ^a  

^a QUEEN S UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 33646496776     PISSN: 00222801     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/315932     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Berlin, 1962),
2. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). References from the English translation are hereafter given in the text as H, followed by the page number(s).
3. Anthony La Vopa, "Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe," Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 81.
4. On the German reception of Strukturwandel, see Peter Hohendahl, "Critical Theory, Public Sphere, and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics," in his The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), pp. 242-80.
5. Historiographical considerations on how Habermas has been and should be appropriated by historians are found in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston, 1992);
6. La Vopa; Dena Goodman, "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime," History and Theory 31 (1992): 1-20;
7. Roger Chartier, "The Public Sphere and Public Opinion," in his The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1991), pp. 20-37;
8. Keith Michael Baker, "Public Opinion as Political Invention," in his Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 167-99;
9. Margaret C. Jacob, "The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1994): 95-113;
10. and William Reddy, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere: Implications for an Historical Ethnography," Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 135-69.
11. French Historical Studies, vol. 17 (1992),
12. contains a forum on the public sphere consisting of essays by Daniel Gordon, "Philosophy, Sociology, and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion," pp. 883-911;
13. and David Bell, "The 'Public Sphere,' the State, and the World of the Law in Eighteenth-Century France," pp. 912-33;
14. and a cogent critical response by Sarah Maza, "Women, the Bourgeoisie, and the Public Sphere: Responses to Daniel Gordon and David Bell," pp. 934-53.
15. More recent essays are John L. Brooke, "Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998): 43-67;
16. and Anna Clark, "Contested Space: The Public and Private Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 269-76.
17. A "Begriffsgeschichte" of Öffentlichkeit is Lucian Hölscher, Öffentlichkeit und Geheimnis (Stuttgart, 1979).
18. Habermas's definition is awkward in that the same term serves as the statement's subject and predicate, producing an apparent circularity: the public sphere is made up of people coming together in the sphere of the public. This awkwardness is largely a result of the translation. The German reads: "Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit lässt sich vorerst als die Sphäre die zum Publikum versammelten Privatleute begreifen" (Habermas, Strukturwandel, p. 38). The translators have opted to standardize several possible meanings of "Öffentlichkeit" (public, publicity, publicness, public sphere) into the term "public sphere," which produces the awkwardness. The decision to standardize the term in translation has serious consequences. As I will argue, it reinforces a prejudging and delimiting of the public sphere that misleads historians. In what follows, I use different translations and sometimes the German term depending on the nature of my argument.
19. Habermas emphasizes the significance of "impartiality" in his essay "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, ed., pp. 421-61. "Indeed, an element intrinsic to the preconditions of communication of all practices of rational debate is the presumption of impartiality and the expectation that the participants question and transcend whatever their initial preferences may have been" (p. 449).
20. And see Thomas McCarthy ("Practical Discourse: On the Relation of Morality to Politics," in Calhoun, ed., pp. 51-72), who points out that given the impartiality requirement, the rational consensus achieved in Habermas's public sphere is ideally not based on a compromise between different social interests - that, as McCarthy puts it, is a "second-best alternative" to an impartial "common interest" (p. 59).
21. Habermas calls these limitations "bourgeois," by which he means that they assumed that only the propertied and educated could enter the public sphere. Recent scholars have raised the important issue of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in this period. In Enlightenment studies, a controversy has appeared that turns on the question of whether and when women were excluded. See in particular Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994);
22. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991);
23. and the sobering critical reassessment of Carla Hesse, "French Women in Print, 1750-1800: An Essay in Historical Bibliography," Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 39 (1998): 65-82, in which Hesse shows how the normative exclusion of women in the public sphere was in striking contradiction to a continuous rise in the number of publications by women in this period.
24. For the former, see Sara Beam, "Apparitions of the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century France," Canadian Journal of History 29 (1994): 1-22;
25. Henry C. Clark, "Commerce, the Virtues, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France," French Historical Studies 21 (1998): 415-40;
26. and Andreas Gestreich, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18ten Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1994).
27. For the latter, see James M. Brophy, "Carnival and Citizenship: The Politics of Carnival Culture in the Prussian Rhineland, 1823-1848," Journal of Social History 30 (1997): 873-904.
28. Belinda Davis, "Reconsidering Habermas, Gender, and the Public Sphere: The Case of Wilhelmine Germany," in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), pp. 397-426. This last point is discussed below.
29. See Hohendahl; see also Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organizationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt, 1972).
30. Geoff Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures," in Calhoun, ed., p. 303.
31. Mary Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," in Calhoun, ed., pp. 259-88.
32. Ryan, "Gender," p. 264.
33. Eley, in Calhoun, ed., p. 306.
34. The papers of Eley and/or Ryan are commonly the only commentaries cited in recent studies of social movements in the public sphere. Eley, e.g., is cited by Howard M. Wach, "Civil Society, Moral Identity, and the Liberal Public Sphere: Manchester and Boston, 1810-40," Social History 21 (1998): 283;
35. Kevin Gilmartin, "Popular Radicalism and the Public Sphere," Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 544;
36. William M. Reddy, "Condottieri of the Pen: Journalists and the Public Sphere in Postrevolutionary France (1815-1850)," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1547;
37. and Kenneth Tucker, Jr., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 212, 228.
38. Ryan is cited by Keith Breckenridge, "'We Must Speak for Ourselves': The Rise and Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Gold Mines, 1920-1931," Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998): 73.
39. Ryan and Eley are both cited by Brophy, p. 892, and Davis, p. 399. Eley's essay has acquired the status of a theoretical statement in its own right; it has been reprinted in a recent anthology of readings in social theory. See Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner, eds., Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 297-335.
40. Ryan has expanded her consideration of the public sphere in Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1997).
41. Brophy, p. 876; Brooke (n. 3 above), p. 51; James Chandler, "Hallam, Tennyson, and the Poetry of Sensation: Aestheticist Allegories of a Counter-Public Sphere," Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 527; Tucker, p. 212; Davis, p. 398.
42. Jan C. Rupp, "The New Science and the Public Sphere in the Premodern Era," Science in Context 8 (1995): 502.
43. On other uses of the public sphere in the history of science, see Thomas Broman, "The Habermasian Public Sphere and 'Science In the Enlightenment,'" History of Science 36 (1998): 123-49.
44. Brooke, p. 43; Davis, p. 398; Ryan, "Gender and Public Access," p. 264.
45. Some rhetorically relate the public sphere to specific kinds of spatialization, calling it an "arena" or a "theater." These terms point not just to the public sphere's spatialization but also to its other attributes of audience-oriented subjectivity and contestatory practices. By "spatialization," I refer only to the most general characteristic of conceiving of the public sphere as a space or domain that one enters, occupies, or leaves.
46. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1964).
47. See, e.g., Joan Scott, "Women in The Making of the English Working Class," in her Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), pp. 68-92.
48. A fuller discussion of the current problem of fragmentation in historical interpretation is in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity" Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 415 ff.
49. Ryan, "Gender and Public Access" (n. 11 above), p. 283.
50. The political theorist Nancy Fraser, drawing explicitly and solely on the papers of Eley and Ryan in the Calhoun volume, reaches this conclusion in her paper in the same volume: "Public spheres are not only arenas for the formation of discursive opinions; in addition, they are arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities." Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Calhoun, ed. (n. 3 above), p. 125.
51. Reddy, "Condottieri," p. 1547; Wach, p. 283; Davis (n. 8 above). The association of a history of social movements, identity politics, and the public sphere underwrites the macrohistorical sociology of the essays in a recent issue of Daedalus. Here writers compare the different "paths to early modernities" by focusing on two linked variables applied to a wide range of European and non-European societies: "the institutionalization of public spheres and the construction of collective identities"
52. (Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, "Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities - a Comparative View," Daedalus 127 [1998]: 15). The connection between the public sphere and "modernity" is discussed in the conclusion of this paper.
53. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971);
54. and see the rethinking of social history in his Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983).
55. Useful guides to the resulting controversies are Harvey Kaye, ed., E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1979);
56. and Patrick Joyce, ed., Class (Oxford, 1995).
57. A good summary of the criticism of the now superseded class interpretations of the French Revolution and the German Sonderweg is William Reddy's Money and Liberty in Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987).
58. In a recent review article of works on working-class protest in England, Anna Clark encapsulates the displacements that I have just described when she states that the works reviewed "depict working people struggling not for control over the means of production but for access to the public sphere and political power" (Clark [n. 3 above], p. 270).
59. Brooke (n. 3 above), p. 56; Brophy (n. 7 above); Clark, p. 56.
60. Habermas, "Further," pp. 426-27.
61. See, e.g., Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991),
62. especially the essays on moral economy and rough music; Louise Tilly, "The Food Riot as a Form of Political Conflict in France," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (1971): 23-57;
63. and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French History (New York, 1984).
64. On complications in this kind of history, see also Harold Mah, "Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre," History Workshop 31 (Spring 1991): 1-20.
65. See the works of Thompson, Tilly, and Darnton listed in n. 28 above.
66. Davis, pp. 411 ff.
67. On the eighteenth-century views of the strangeness of Öffentlichkeit, see La Vopa (n. 2 above), pp. 79-80. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville shows the same unsettled recognition: "So in democracies public opinion has a strange power. . . . It uses no persuasion to forward its beliefs, but by some mighty pressure of the mind of all upon the intelligence of each it imposes its ideas and makes them penetrate men's very souls" (quoted in H, p. 134). Jon Klancher, in his introduction to a volume of Studies on Romanticism (1994) on "Romanticism and Its Public," points out (pp. 523-24) similarly stupefied reactions on the part of English Romantics. Mona Ozouf, "'Public Opinion' at the End of the Old Regime," Journal of Modern History 60, suppl. (September 1988): S21, characterizes the public sphere as a "genuinely contradictory concept," to which we might add that it is also a genuinely mixed metaphor.
68. Louis de Carmontelle, quoted in Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 18.
69. This is better appreciated by literary historians than by historians of social movements. See Alexander Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 193, which provides a pointed quote from Habermas on this issue. Michael Warner has offered the most imaginative study based on this point.
70. See Warner, Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1992),
71. and his contribution to the Calhoun volume, the only one that takes into account the transformation of the public into a mass subject, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in Calhoun, ed. (n. 3 above), pp. 377-402.
72. Quoted in Gilmartin (n. 14 above), p. 553.
73. Ibid.
74. Mona Ozouf, "Public Opinion," S2-S21,
75. and "Public Spirit," in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 771-80;
76. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 27, 37, 46, 47, 77;
77. Keith Michael Baker, Inventing (n. 3 above). In her excellent review of Furet's book, Lynn Hunt treats these terms as synonyms for Öffentlichkeit. According to Furet, Hunt writes, "revolutionary politics quickly turned into a struggle for the appropriation of public opinion. Who speaks in the name of the people?" And Furet is critically concerned, as Hunt puts it, with "the general will, the people, the nation as a source of legitimacy." Lynn Hunt, "Review Essay on Penser la révolution française," History and Theory 20 (1981): 317.
78. Furet, p. 38. In a more recent essay, Baker also points to the process that Furet identifies as producing both abstract individuals and a universal order, calling it here "dedifferentiation." Keith Baker, "A Foucauldian French Revolution?" in Foucault and the Writing of History, ed. Jan Goldstein (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 190.
79. Furet, p. 29. On the trope of parthenogenesis in Furet's interpretation see below.
80. Ozouf, "Public Opinion," p. S11.
81. Baker, Inventing, p. 10.
82. Furet, pp. 29, 50-51, and see pp. 16, 22, 48.
83. Ozouf, "Public Opinion" (n. 31 above), p. 51. The art critic, Louis de Carmontelle, cited to illustrate the coming to unity of the collective subject, could also characterize the public in the opposite fashion, as the impossibility of being a unified subject: "The Salon opens and the crowd presses through the entrance; how its diversity and turbulence disturbs (sic) the spectator! This person here, moved by vanity, wants only to be the first to give his opinion; that one there, moved by boredom, searches only for a new spectacle. Here is one who treats pictures as simple items of commerce and concerns himself only to estimate the prices they will fetch; another hopes only that they will provide material for his idle chat. . . . The inferior class of people, accustomed to adjusting its tastes to those of its masters, waits to hear a titled person before rendering its opinion. And wherever one looks, countless young clerks, merchants, and shop assistants in whom unchanging, tedious daily labor has inevitably extinguished all feeling for beauty: here nevertheless are the men whom every artist has endeavoured to please." Quoted in Crow (n. 32 above), p. 19.
84. Furet, p. 60. The insight of Robespierre, according to Furet, was to recognize that only the ruthless exercise of power could stabilize the contradictions of the public as mass subject; Robespierre was "that alchemist of revolutionary opinion-making" who "was able to transform all the logical quandaries of direct democracy into secret tools of domination" (p. 56).
85. Baker, Inventing (n. 3 above), p. 304.
86. In "A Foucauldian French Revolution?" Baker reaffirms the connection between the politics of the general will and the Terror. He writes: "[the Terror] demonstrated not only the energies unleashed by generalizing the sovereign will but the excesses that could result" - a conclusion that he supports by linking it to the views of those who came after the Revolution: "And in postrevolutionary discourse the experience of the Terror came, above all, to symbolize the constant threat of sovereign will - that scourge, as Benjamin Constant put it, with which the revolutionaries had afflicted the entire society" (p. 205). See William S. Cormack, Revolution and Political Conflict in the French Navy, 1789-1794 (Cambridge, 1995) for an interesting attempt to apply the analyses of Baker and Furet in a specific case study. Baker's "Foucauldian" analysis of the Revolution is discussed below.
87. Ozouf, "Public Opinion," pp. S16, S21.
88. Ozouf, "Public Opinion," pp. Ibid., p. S19.
89. Baker, Inventing, p. 240.
90. Baker, Inventing, Ibid., p. 305. The concern with establishing a rational politics of representation against an unstable politics of the general will has been a recurring theme in Baker's work. In his first book, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), he discusses the plans of Turgot to ensure a rational politics of representation by basing it on a system, of social representation (p. 209), and he shows how Turgot's onetime follower Condorcet devised a complex system of voting organized around a sophisticated probability theory to ensure that the outcome of the voting would be rational (pp. 234 ff.). For Condorcet, in the Revolution the worst fear of an irrational politics was the fear of the instabilities of a particular group claiming to represent the whole. Condorcet, Baker tells us, struggled in the Revolution against "the direct action of the people, particularly the people of Paris, acting in the name of the sovereignty of the whole" (p. 322).
91. Furet (n. 36 above), pp. 70, 75, and see p. 74.
92. Ibid., p. 29.
93. This is not an unusual response to the strange transformations of the public sphere. Compare with Robert Michels's classic work, Political Parties (1910; reprint, New York, 1962), p. 77: "As this complexity [of political life] increases, it becomes more and more absurd to attempt to 'represent' a heterogeneous mass in all the innumerable problems which arise out of the increasing differentiation of our political and economic life. To represent, in this sense, comes to mean that the purely individual desire masquerades and is accepted as the will of the masses."
94. Furet, p. 23.
95. Ibid., pp. 29, 22, emphasis in original, and see pp. 13 ff. This characterization of the Revolution as an "uncaused cause" points to the tendency to fashion rhetorically the appearance of the public as mass subject as the return of a displaced religious impulse: archaic (for Ozouf) and self-creating (for Furet), the Revolution becomes an all-encompassing and all-powerful deity, not a subject, but a Subject (as Baker put it).
96. Baker, Inventing (n. 3 above), p. 305; and see Hunt (n. 36 above), p. 319, for a similar criticism.
97. The third discourse, the discourse of justice or traditional privileges, is identified with the Parlement of Paris and falls out of historical importance once the Estates General is called.
98. See Albert Hirschman's classic work, The Passion and the Interests (Princeton, N.J., 1977). After showing how this peculiar view arose, Hirschman points out how it was challenged by Rousseau, who criticized its undercutting of rational interests (p. 126). I do not raise another problematic assumption in the arguments of the historians of the French Revolution, that social interests are transparent, but I should note that the transparency of self-interest is a vexing issue, vexing enough to have produced notions such as "ideology" and "hegemony" and to problematize any rational choice theory. I might also note that not only does the pursuit of social interests not have an inherent tendency toward rational compromise but that it may just as easily lead to civil war and terror, as the cases of Pinochet's Chile and Franco's Spain might suggest.
99. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and the Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (New York, 1993), p. 194.
100. See esp. the chapter "Whether the General Will Is Fallible," Rousseau, pp. 200-203.
101. Hunt links Furet to Cornelius Castoriadis's L'institution imaginare de la société (Paris, 1975), but she also points out significant differences.
102. think a better fit is with the work of Claude Lefort. Compare Furet's, Baker's, and Ozouf's analyses of the impossibility of representing the general will or the public with Lefort's views of democracy in L'invention démocratique (Paris, 1981), p. 173:
103. "La démocratie inaugure l'expérience d'une société insaisissable, immaîtrisable, dans laquelle le peuple sera dit sourverain, certes, mais où il ne cessera de faire question en son identité, ou celle-ci demeurera latente." In Inventing, p. 308, n. 8,
104. Baker mentions the influence of Ernesto Laclau's and Chantai Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, 1985). I discuss this below.
105. Baker's invocation in Inventing of Laclau's and Mouffe's critique of "the positivity of the social" is vitiated by his ultimate privileging of a discourse of social interests: what he rejects as an empirical reality, he restores as a discourse. The enlisting of Foucault as an influence is odd because all of his work has been directed precisely against the liberal narrative of rational modernity. In a more recent essay, "A Foucauldian French Revolution," Baker seeks to offer a more sustained consideration of a Foucauldian approach to the Revolution. But he proceeds by following again the lead of Furet ("we have learned," he writes, "a great deal in recent years, from François Furet and those who have followed his lead, about the specifically political mechanisms and dynamic of the Revolution" [n. 37 above], p. 190). Translating the terms of Furet into those of Foucault ("Drawing on that [Furet et al.'s] work and giving it a somewhat more Foucauldian cast" p. 190), Baker's Foucauldian interpretation still turns on the dynamic that issues from the instabilities of representing the public as a mass subject or general will. What is difficult to assess is, first, how committed Baker is to a Foucauldian analysis, since the essay is couched entirely in a hypothetical mode (as the question mark in the title indicates), and, second, whether a Foucauldian analysis would contradict a Furetian one. I believe that the teleological nature of Furet's view of the general will or public as a mass subject, a view dependent on a narrative of rational modernity, would still be incompatible with a Foucauldian emphasis on contingency and a Foucauldian hostility to liberal norms. Baker does not discuss in this article the discourse of social interests, and if he has opted for a more Foucauldian interpretation, then it would follow that he would come to see that discourse in a new light - no longer as a normative condition of rational modernity, but as a discourse that sets out to manufacture and regulate a particular kind of subjectivity.
106. Seyla Benhabib, "Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas," in Calhoun, ed. (n. 3 above), p. 85. Benhabib makes in a different way the point I develop below, namely, that there is also attached to these negative aspects a positive character. I argue, however, that this character is phantasmic and problematic.
107. The historians of social groups may suggest that they have entered a postmodern condition of diverse local identities and diverse, incommensurate forms of knowledge and expression. That may be the case but that does not mean that in the public sphere they would be exempt from its formal conditions. To the modern public sphere, there would be no difference between the pre- and the postmodern - both are expressions of group particularity. The question is whether the postmodern identities confront each other in a modern public sphere. If so, they would still be subject to its formal defining conditions.