The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 590

Beschreibung

This major work retraces the emergence and development of the Bourgeois public sphere - that is, a sphere which was distinct from the state and in which citizens could discuss issues of general interest. In analysing the historical transformations of this sphere, Habermas recovers a concept which is of crucial significance for current debates in social and political theory. Habermas focuses on the liberal notion of the bourgeois public sphere as it emerged in Europe in the early modern period. He examines both the writings of political theorists, including Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville, and the specific institutions and social forms in which the public sphere was realized. This brilliant and influential work has been widely recognized for many years as a classic of contemporary social and political thought, of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Author’s Preface

I Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere

1 The Initial Question

2 Remarks on the Type of Representative Publicness

3 On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

II Social Structures of the Public Sphere

4 The Basic Blueprint

5 Institutions of the Public Sphere

6 The Bourgeois Family and the Institutionalization of a Privateness Oriented to an Audience

7 The Public Sphere in the World of Letters in Relation to the Public Sphere in the Political Realm

III Political Functions of the Public Sphere

8 The Model Case of British Development

9 The Continental Variants

10 Civil Society as the Sphere of Private Autonomy: Private Law and a Liberalized Market

11 The Contradictory Insti tu tionalization of the Public Sphere in the Bourgeois Constitutional State

IV The Bourgeois Public Sphere: Idea and Ideology

12 Public Opinion—Opinion Publique—Öffentache Meinung: On the Prehistory of the Phrase

13 Publicity as the Bridging Principle between Politics and Morality (Kant)

14 On the Dialectic of the Public Sphere (Hegel and Marx)

15 The Ambivalent View of the Public Sphere in the Theory of Liberalism (John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville)

V The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

16 The Tendency toward a Mutual Infiltration of Public and Private Spheres

17 The Polarization of the Social Sphere and the Intimate Sphere

18 From a Culture-Debating (Eulturräsonierend) Public to a Culture-Consuming Public

19 The Blurred Blueprint: Developmental Pathways in the Disintegration of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

VI The Transformation of the Public Sphere’s Political Function

20 From the Journalism of Private Men of Letters to the Public Consumer Services of the Mass Media: The Public Sphere as a Platform for Advertising

21 The Transmuted Function of the Principle of Publicity

22 Manufactured Publicity and Nonpublic Opinion: The Voting Behavior of the Population

23 The Political Public Sphere and the Transformation of the Liberal Constitutional State into a Social-Welfare State

VII On the Concept of Public Opinion

24 Public Opinion as a Fiction of Constitutional Law—and the Social-Psychological Liquidation of the Concept

25 A Sociological Attempt at Clarification

Notes

Index

Copyright © 1989 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyThis work originally appeared in German under the title Strukturwandel derÖffenlicheit, © 1962 Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, Darmstadt and Neuwied,Germany.

First published in Great Britain 1989 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1992

Reprinted in 1994, 1996, 1999,2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 (twice), 2010,2011

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1DR, UK

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-0274-5ISBN: 978-0-7456-1077-1 (pb)

To Wolfgang Abendroth in gratitude

Introduction

There is no good reason why Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, one of Habermas’s most influential and widely translated works, should not have appeared in English sooner. That would likely have facilitated the reception of his thought among Anglo-American scholars by showing how the more abstract and theoretical concerns of his later work arose out of the concrete issues raised in this study. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a historical-sociological account of the emergence, transformation, and disintegration of the bourgeois public sphere. It combines materials and methods from sociology and economics, law and political science, and social and cultural history in an effort to grasp the preconditions, structures, functions, and inner tensions of this central domain of modern society. As a sphere between civil society and the state, in which critical public discussion of matters of general interest was institutionally guaranteed, the liberal public sphere took shape in the specific historical circumstances of a developing market economy. In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people.

Habermas traces the interdependent development of the literary and political self-consciousness of this new class, weaving together accounts of the rise of the novel and of literary and political journalism and the spread of reading societies, salons, and coffee houses into a Bildungsroman of this “child of the eighteenth century.” He notes the contradiction between the liberal public sphere’s constitutive catalogue of “basic rights of man” and their de facto restriction to a certain class of men. And he traces the tensions this occasioned as, with the further development of capitalism, the public body expanded beyond the bourgeoisie to include groups that were systematically dis-advantaged by the workings of the free market and sought state regulation and compensation. The consequent intertwining of state and society in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries meant the end of the liberal public sphere. The public sphere of social-welfare-state democracies is rather a field of competition among conflicting interests, in which organizations representing diverse constituencies negotiate and compromise among themselves and with government officials, while excluding the public from their proceedings. Public opinion is, to be sure, taken into account, but not in the form of unrestricted public discussion. Its character and function are indicated rather by the terms in which it is addressed: “public opinion research,” “publicity,” “public relations work,” and so forth. The press and broadcast media serve less as organs of public information and debate than as technologies for managing consensus and promoting consumer culture.

While the historical structures of the liberal public sphere reflected the particular constellation of interests that gave rise to it, the idea it claimed to embody—that of rationalizing public authority under the institutionalized influence of informed discussion and reasoned agreement—remains central to democratic theory. In a post-liberal era, when the classical model of the public sphere is no longer sociopolitically feasible, the question becomes: can the public sphere be effectively reconstituted under radically different socioeconomic, political and cultural conditions? In short, is democracy possible? One could do worse than to view Habermas’s work in the twenty-five years since Strukturwandel through the lens of this question. That is not, however, the only or the best reason for publishing this English edition now. The contingencies of intellectual history have placed us in a situation that is particularly well disposed to its appearance:

Feminist social theorists, having identified institutional divisions between the public and the private as a thread running through the history of the subordination of women will find here a case study in the sociostructural transformation of a classic form of that division.

Political theorists, having come to feel the lack of both large-scale social analysis and detailed empirical inquiry in the vast discussion centering around Rawls’s normative theory of justice, will appreciate this empirical-theoretical account of the network of interdependencies that have defined and limited the democratic practice of justice.

Literary critics and theorists who have grown dissatisfied with purely textual approaches will be interested in Habermas’s cultural-sociological account of the emergence of the literary public sphere and its functioning within the broader society.

Comparative-historical sociologists will see here an exemplary study that manages to combine a macroanalysis of large-scale structural changes with interpretive access to the shifting meanings by and to which actors are oriented.

Political sociologists will discover that familiar problems of democratic political participation, the relation of economy to polity, and the meaning of public opinion are cast in a new light by Habermas’s theoretical perspective and historical analysis.

Communications and media researchers will profit not only from Habermas’s account of the rise of literary journalism and the subsequent transformation of the press into one of several mass media of a consumer society, but also from the framework for future research that this account suggests.

Legal theorists will discover here a way of critically analyzing the gaps between claim and reality which avoids the dead end of pure deconstruction.

In all of these areas, to be sure, significant work has been done since Habermas first published this study. But I think it fair to say that no single work, or body of work, has succeeded in fusing these disparate lines of inquiry into a unified whole of comparable insight and power. In this respect it remains paradigmatic.

Thomas McCarthyNorthwestern University

Translator’s Note

Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere contains a number of terms that present problems to the translator. One of these, Öffentlichkeit, which appears in the very title of the book, may be rendered variously as “(the) public,” “public sphere,” or “publicity.” Whenever the context made more than one of these terms sensible, “public sphere” was chosen as the preferred version.

Habermas distinguishes several types of Öffentlichkeit:

politische Öffentlichkeit: “political public sphere” (or sometimes the more cumbersome “public sphere in the political realm”)

literarische Öffentlichkeit: “literary public sphere” (or “public sphere in the world of letters”)

repräsentative Öffentlichkeit: “representative publicness” (i.e., the display of inherent spiritual power or dignity before an audience)

Another troublesome term is bürgerlich, an adjective related to the noun Bürger, which may be translated as “bourgeois” or “citizen.” Bürgerlich possesses both connotations. In expressions such as “civil code,” “civil society,” “civic duty,” “bourgeois strata,” and “bourgeois family” the German term for “civil,” “civic,” and “bourgeois” is bürgerlich. Bürgerlich also means “middle class” in contrast to “noble” or “peasant.” Bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit thus is difficult to translate adequately. For better or worse, it is rendered here as “bourgeois public sphere.”

Intimsphäre denotes the core of a person’s private sphere which by law, tact, and convention is shielded from intrusion; it is translated here as “intimate sphere.”

Thomas Burger

Author’s Preface

This investigation endeavors to analyze the type “bourgeois public sphere” (bürgerliche Öffentlichkeü). Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline. Rather, the category “public sphere” must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of “politics.”1 When considered within the boundaries of a particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates. The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious: given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.

The other peculiarity of our method results from the necessity of having to proceed at once sociologically and historically. We conceive bourgeois public sphere as a category that is typical of an epoch. It cannot be abstracted from the unique developmental history of that “civil society” {bürgerliche Gesell-schaft) originating in the European High Middle Ages; nor can it be transferred, idealtypically generalized, to any number of historical situations that represent formally similar constellations. Just as we try to show, for instance, that one can properly speak of public opinion in a precise sense only with regard to late-seventeenth-century Great Britain and eighteenth-century France, we treat public sphere in general as a historical category. In this respect our procedure is distinguished a limine from the approach of formal sociology whose advanced state nowadays is represented by so-called structural-functional theory. The sociological investigation of historical trends proceeds on a level of generality at which unique processes and events can only be cited as examples—that is, as cases that can be interpreted as instances of a more general social development. This sociological procedure differs from the practice of histo-riography strictly speaking in that it seems less bound to the specifics of the historical material, yet it observes its own equally strict criteria for the structural analysis of the interdependencies at the level of society as a whole.

After these two methodological preliminaries, we would also like to record a reservation pertaining to the subject matter itself. Our investigation is limited to the structure and function of the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere, to its emergence and transformation. Thus it refers to those features of a historical constellation that attained dominance and leaves aside the plebeian public sphere as a variant that in a sense was suppressed in the historical process. In the stage of the French Revolution associated with Robespierre, for just one moment, a public sphere stripped of its literary garb began to function—its subject was no longer the “educated strata” but the uneducated “people.” Yet even this plebeian public sphere, whose continued but submerged existence manifested itself in the Chartist Movement and especially in the anarchist traditions of the workers’ movement on the continent, remains oriented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere. In the perspective of intellectual history it was, like the latter, a child of the eighteenth century. Precisely for this reason it must be strictly distinguished from the plebiscitary-acclamatory form of regimented public sphere characterizing dictatorships in highly developed industrial societies. Formally they have certain traits in common; but each differs in its own way from the literary character of a public sphere constituted by private people putting reason to use—one is illiterate, the other, after a fashion, post-literary. The similarity with certain aspects of plebiscitary form cannot conceal the fact that these two variants of the public sphere of bourgeois society (which in the context of the present investigation will be equally neglected) have also been charged with different political functions, each at a distinct stage of social development.

Our investigation presents a stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere and of their transformation in the social-welfare state.

I am grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for generous support. This work, with the exception of sections 13 and 14, was presented to the Philosophical Faculty at Marburg as my Habilitationsschrift.

JH.

Frankfurt, Autumn 1961

I

Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere

1

The Initial Question

The usage of the words “public” and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment. Not just ordinary language (especially as it bears the imprint of bureaucratic and mass media jargon) but also the sciences—particularly juris-prudence, political science, and sociology—do not seem capable of replacing traditional categories like “public” and “private,” “public sphere,” and “public opinion,” with more precise terms. Ironically, this dilemma has first of all bedeviled the very discipline that explicitly makes public opinion its subject matter. With the application of empirical techniques, the object that public-opinion research was to apprehend has dissolved into something elusive;1 nevertheless sociology has refused to abandon altogether these categories; it continues to study public opinion.

We call events and occasions “public” when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs—as when we speak of public places or public houses. But as in the expression “public building,” the term need not refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have to be open to public traffic. “Public buildings” simply house state institutions and as such are “public.” The state is the “public authority.” It owes this attribute to its task of promoting the public or common welfare of its rightful members. The word has yet another meaning when one speaks of a “public [official] reception”; on such occasions a powerful display of representation is staged whose “publicity” contains an element of public recognition. There is a shift in meaning again when we say that someone has made a name for himself, has a public reputation. The notion of such personal prestige or renown originated in epochs other than that of “polite society.”

None of these usages, however, have much affinity with the meaning most commonly associated with the category—expressions like “public opinion,” an “outraged” or “informed public,” “publicity,” “publish,” and “publicize.” The subject of this publicity is the public as carrier of public opinion; its function as a critical judge is precisely what makes the public character of proceedings—in court, for instance—meaningful. In the realm of the mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning. Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion: public relations and efforts recently baptized “publicity work” are aimed at producing such publicity. The public sphere itself appears as a specific domain—the public domain versus the private. Sometimes the public appears simply as that sector of public opinion that happens to be opposed to the authorities. Depending on the circumstances, either the organs of the state or the media, like the press, which provide communication among members of the public, may be counted as “public organs.”

A social-historical analysis of the syndrome of meanings possessed by “public” and “publicity” could uncover the essential sociological characteristics of the various historical language strata. The first etymological reference to the public sphere is quite revealing. In German the noun Öffentlichkeit was formed from the older adjective öffentlich during the eighteenth century,2 in analogy to “publicité” and “publicity”; by the close of the century the word was still so little used that Heynatz could consider it objectionable.3 If the public sphere did not require a name of its own before this period, we may assume that this sphere first emerged and took on its function only at that time, at least in Germany. It was specifically a part of “civil society,” which at the same time established itself as the realm of commodity exchange and social labor governed by its own laws. Notions concerning what is “public” and what is not—that is, what is “private”—however, can be traced much further back into the past.

We are dealing here with categories of Greek origin transmitted to us bearing a Roman stamp. In the fully developed Greek city-state the sphere of the polis, which was common (koine) to the free citizens, was strictly separated from the sphere of the oikos; in the sphere of the oikos, each individual is in his own realm (idia). The public life, bios politikos, went on in the market place (agora), but of course this did not mean that it occurred necessarily only in this specific locale. The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis), be it the waging of war or competition in athletic games. (Strangers were often called upon to legislate, which was not properly one of the public tasks.) The political order, as is well known, rested on a patrimonial slave economy. The citizens were thus set free from productive labor; it was, however, their private autonomy as masters of households on which their participation in public life depended. The private sphere was attached to the house not by (its Greek) name only. Movable wealth and control over labor power were no more substitutes for being the master of a household and of a family than, conversely, poverty and a lack of slaves would in themselves prevent admission to the polis. Exile, expropriation, and the destruction of the house amounted to one and the same thing. Status in the polis was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos. The reproduction of life, the labor of the slaves, and the service of the women went on under the aegis of the master’s domination; birth and death took place in its shadow; and the realm of necessity and transitoriness remained immersed in the obscurity of the private sphere. In contrast to it stood, in Greek self-interpretation, the public sphere as a realm of freedom and permanence. Only in the light of the public sphere did that which existed become revealed, did everything become visible to all. In the discussion among citizens issues were made topical and took on shape. In the competition among equals the best excelled and gained their essence—the immortality of fame. Just as the wants of life and the procurement of its necessities were shamefully hidden inside the oikos, so the polis provided an open field for honorable distinction: citizens indeed interacted as equals with equals (homoioi), but each did his best to excel (aristoiein). The virtues, whose catalogue was codified by Aristotle, were ones whose test lies in the public sphere and there alone receive recognition.

Since the Renaissance this model of the Hellenic public sphere, as handed down to us in the stylized form of Greek self-interpretation, has shared with everything else considered “classical” a peculiarly normative power.4 Not the social formation at its base but the ideological template itself has preserved continuity over the centuries—on the level of intellectual history. To begin with, throughout the Middle Ages the categories of the public and the private and of the public sphere understood as res publica were passed on in the definitions of Roman law. Of course, they found a renewed application meaningful in the technical, legal sense only with the rise of the modern state and of that sphere of civil society separated from it. They served the political self-interpretation as well as the legal institutionalization of a public sphere that was bourgeois in a specific sense. Meanwhile, however, for about a century the social foundations of this sphere have been caught up in a process of decomposition. Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable, for while its scope is expanding impressively, its function has become progressively insignificant. Still, publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order. It is apparently more and other than a mere scrap of liberal ideology that a social democracy could discard without harm. If we are successful in gaining a historical understanding of the structures of this complex that today, confusedly enough, we subsume under the heading “public sphere,” we can hope to attain thereby not only a sociological clarification of the concept but a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories.

2

Remarks on the Type of Representative Publicness

During the Middle Ages in Europe the contrast drawn in Roman law between publicus and privatus5 was familiar but had no standard usage. The precarious attempt to apply it to the legal conditions of the feudal system of domination based on fiefs and manorial authority (Grundherrschaft) unintentionally provides evidence that an opposition between the public and private spheres on the ancient (or the modern) model did not exist. Here too an economic organization of social labor caused all relations of domination to be centered in the lord’s household. Nevertheless, the feudal lord’s position within the process of production was not comparable to the “private” authority of the oikodespotes or of the pater familias. While manorial authority (and its derivative, feudalism) as the quintessence of all lordly particular rights might be conceived of as a jurisdictio, it could not be fitted readily into the contrast between private dominion (dominium) and public autonomy (imperium). There were lower and higher “sovereignties,” eminent and less eminent prerogatives; but there was no status that in terms of private law defined in some fashion the capacity in which private people could step forward into a public sphere. In Germany manorial authority, fully developed in the High Middle Ages, was transformed into private landed property only in the eighteenth century as part of the liberation of the peasants and the clearing of land holdings from feudal obligations. The domestic authority of the head of a household is not the same as private dominion, whether in the sense of classical law or in that of modern civil law. When the latter’s categories were transferred to social conditions providing no basis for division between the public sphere and the private domain, difficulties arose:

If we think of the land as the public sphere, then the house and the authority exercised by its master must simply be considered a public authority of the second order: it is certainly private in relation to that of the land to which it is subordinated, but surely in a sense very different from how the term is understood in modern private law. Thus it seems quite intelligible to me that “private” and “public” powers are so fused together into an indivisible unity that both are emanations from a single unified authority, that they are inseparable from the land and can be treated like legitimate private rights.6

It should be noted, however, that the tradition of ancient Germanic law, through the categories “gemeinlich” and “sunder-lich” “common” and “particular,” did generate a contrast that corresponded somewhat to the classical one between “publicus” and “privatus.” That contrast referred to communal elements to the extent to which they survived under the feudal conditions of production. The commons was public, publica; for common use there was public access to the fountain and market square—loci communes, loci publici. The “particular” stood opposed to this “common,” which etymologically is related to the common or public welfare (common wealth, public wealth). This specific meaning of “private” as “particular” reverberates in today’s equation of special interests with private interests. Yet one should note that within the framework of feudalism the particular also included those who possessed special rights, that is, those with immunities and privileges. In this respect the particular (i.e., what stood apart), the exception through every sort of exemption, was the core of the feudal regime and hence of the realm that was “public.” The original parallelism of Germanic and Roman legal categories was reversed as soon as they were absorbed by feudalism—the common man became the private man. A linguistic reminder of this relationship is the use of “private” in the sense of “common” soldier—the ordinary man without rank and without the particularity of a special power to command interpreted as “public.” In medieval documents “lordly” and “publicus” were used synonymously; publicare meant to claim for the lord.7 The ambivalence in the meaning of “gemein” (common) as “communal,” that is, (publicly) accessible to all and “ordinary,” that is, without special right (namely, lordly prerogative) and without official rank in general still reflects the integration of elements of communal (genossenschaftlich) organization into a social structure based on manorial authority.8

Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria, a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages. Nevertheless it was no accident that the attributes of lordship, such as the ducal seal, were called “public”; not by accident did the English king enjoy “publicness”9—for lordship was something publicly represented. This publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted. In itself the status of manorial lord, on whatever level, was neutral in relation to the criteria of “public” and “private”; but its incumbent represented it publicly. He displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of “higher” power.10 The concept of representation in this sense has been preserved down to the most recent constitutional doctrine, according to which representation can “occur only in public … there is no representation that would be a ‘private’ matter.”11 For representation pretended to make something invisible visible through the public presence of the person of the lord: “… something that has no life, that is inferior, worthless, or mean, is not representable. It lacks the exalted sort of being suitable to be elevated into public status, that is, into existence. Words like excellence, highness, majesty, fame, dignity, and honor seek to characterize this peculiarity of a being that is capable of representation.” Representation in the sense in which the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his clients had nothing to do with this publicity of representation inseparable from the lord’s concrete existence, that, as an “aura,” surrounded and endowed his authority. When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and wordly lords, knights, prelates, and cities (or as in the German Empire until 1806 when the Emperor invited the princes and bishops, Imperial counts, Imperial towns, and abbots to the Imperial Diet), this was not a matter of an assembly of delegates that was someone else’s representative. As long as the prince and the estates of his realm “were” the country and not just its representatives, they could represent it in a specific sense. They represented their lordship not for but “before” the people.

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)12—in a word, to a strict code of “noble” conduct. The latter crystallized during the High Middle Ages into the system of courtly virtues, a Christianized form of the Aristotelian cardinal virtues, which subdued the heroic to form the chivalrous and courteous. Characteristically, in none of these virtues did the physical aspect entirely lose its significance, for virtue must be embodied, it had to be capable of public representation.13 Especially in the joust, the replica of the cavalry battle, this representation came into its own. To be sure, the public sphere of the Greek polis was no stranger to a competitive display of arete; but the publicity of courtly-knighdy representation which, appropriately enough, was fully displayed on feast days, the “high holy days,” rather than on court days was completely unlike a sphere of political communication. Rather, as the aura of feudal authority, it indicated social status. This is why it had no particular “location”: the knightly code of conduct was common as a norm to all nobles, from the king down to the lowliest knight standing just above the peasants. It provided orientation not merely on definite occasions at definite locales (say, “in” a public sphere) but constantly and everywhere, as representative of their lordly rights.

Only the ecclesiastical lords had, in addition to the occasions that were part of the affairs of the world, a specific locale for their representation: the church. In church ritual, liturgy, mass, and processions, the publicity that characterized representation has survived into our time. According to a well-known saying the British House of Lords, the Prussian General Staff, the French Academy, and the Vatican in Rome were the last pillars of representation; finally only the Church was left, “so utterly alone that those who see in it no more than an external form cannot suppress the epigrammatic joke that it no longer represents anything except representation itself.”14 For all that, the relationship of the laity to the priesthood illustrates how the “surroundings” were part and parcel of the publicity of representation (from which they were nevertheless excluded)—those surroundings were private in the sense in which the private soldier was excluded from representation and from military honor, even though he had to be “part.” The complement of this exclusion was a secret at the inner core of publicity: the latter was based on an arcanum; mass and the Bible were read in Latin rather than in the language of the people.

The representation of courtly-knightly publicity attained its ultimate pure form at the French and Burgundian courts in the fifteenth century.15 The famous Spanish ceremonial was the petrified version of this late flowering and in this form survived for several centuries at the courts of the Hapsburg. A new form of the representative publicness, whose source was the culture of the nobility of early capitalist northern Italy, emerged first in Florence and then in Paris and London. It demonstrated its vigor, however, in its assimilation of bourgeois culture, whose early manifestation was humanism; the culture of humanism became a component of courtly life.16 However, following the activities of the first tutors to princes (i.e., as early as around 1400) humanism—which developed the art of philological criticism only in the course of the sixteenth century— became the vehicle for reshaping the style of courtly life itself. Under the influence of the Cortegiano the humanistically cultivated courtier replaced the Christian knight. The slightly later notions of the gentleman in Great Britain and of the honnête homme in France described similar types. Their serene and eloquent sociability was characteristic of the new “society” centered in the court.17 The independent provincial nobility based in the feudal rights attached to the land lost its power to represent; publicity of representation was concentrated at the prince’s court. The upshot of this was the baroque festivity in which all of its elements were united one more time, sensationally and magnificently.

In comparison to the secular festivities of the Middle Ages and even of the Renaissance the baroque festival had already lost its public character in the literal sense. Joust, dance, and theater retreated from the public places into the enclosures of the park, from the streets into the rooms of the palace. The castle park made its first appearance in the middle of the seventeenth century but then spread rapidly over Europe along with the architecture of the French Century. Like the baroque palace itself, which was built around the grand hall in which the festivities were staged, the castle park permitted a courtly life sealed off from the outside world. However, the basic pattern of the representative publicness not only survived but became more prominent. Mademoiselle de Scudéry reported in her Conversations the stress of the grand festivities; these served not so much the pleasure of the participants as the demonstration of grandeur, that is, the grandeur of the host and guests. The common people, content to look on, had the most fun.18 Thus even here the people were not completely excluded; they were ever present in the streets. Representation was still dependent on the presence of people before whom it was displayed.19 Only the banquets of bourgeois notables became exclusive, taking place behind closed doors:

The bourgeois is distinguished from the courtly mentality by the fact that in the bourgeois home even the ballroom is still homey, whereas in the palace even the living quarters are still festive. And actually, beginning with Versailles, the royal bedroom develops into the palace’s second center. If one finds here the bed set up like a stage, placed on a platform, a throne for lying down, separated by a barrier from the area for the spectator, this is so because in fact this room is the scene of the daily ceremonies of lever and coucher, where what is most intimate is raised to public importance.20

In the etiquette of Louis XIV concentration of the publicity of representation at the court attained the high point of refinement.

The aristocratic “society” that emerged from that Renaissance society no longer had to represent its own lordliness (i.e., its manorial authority), or at least no longer primarily; it served as a vehicle for the representation of the monarch. Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy and shattered the feudal foundations of power could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability—highly individuated, in spite of its comprehensive etiquette—into that peculiarly free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of “good society” in the eighteenth century.21 The final form of the representative publicness, reduced to the monarch’s court and at the same time receiving greater emphasis, was already an enclave within a society separating itself from the state. Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense.

Thus the German word privat, which was borrowed from the Latin privatus, can be found only after the middle of the sixteenth century,22 having the same meaning as was assumed by the English “private” and the French privé. It meant as much as “not holding public office or official position,”23ohne öffent-liches Amt,24 or sans emplois que l’engage dans les affaires publiques.25 “Private” designated the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus; for “public” referred to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler. The public (das Publikum, le public), was the “public authority” (öffentache Gewalt) in contrast to everything “private” (Privatwesen). The servants of the state were öffentliche Personen, public persons, or personnes publiques; they were incumbent in some official position, their official business was “public” (öffentliches Amt, service public), and government buildings and institutions were called “public.” On the other hand, there were private individuals, private offices, private business, and private homes; Gott-helf speaks of the Privatmann (private person). The authorities were contrasted with the subjects excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare, while the latter pursued their private interests.

The major tendencies that prevailed by the end of the eighteenth century are well-known. The feudal powers, the Church, the prince, and the nobility, who were the carriers of the representative publicness, disintegrated in a process of polarization; in the end they split into private elements, on the one hand, and public ones, on the other. The status of the Church changed as a result of the Reformation; the anchoring in divine authority that it represented—that is, religion—became a private matter. The so-called freedom of religion historically secured the first sphere of private autonomy; the Church itself continued to exist as one corporate body among others under public law. The first visible mark of the analogous polarization of princely authority was the separation of the public budget from the territorial ruler’s private holdings. The bureaucracy, the military (and to some extent also the administration of justice) became independent institutions of public authority separate from the progressively privatized sphere of the court. Out of the estates, finally, the elements of political prerogative developed into organs of public authority: partly into a parliament, and partly into judicial organs. Elements of occupational status group organization, to the degree that they were already involved in the urban corporations and in certain differentiations within the estates of the land, developed into the sphere of “civil society” that as the genuine domain of private autonomy stood opposed to the state.

Excursus: The Demise of the Representative Publicness Illustrated by the Case of Wilhelm Meister

Forms of the representative publicness, to be sure, remained very much in force up to the beginning of the nineteenth century; this held true especially for economically and politically backward Germany, in which Goethe wrote the second version of his Wilhelm Meister. This novel contains a letter26 in which Wilhelm renounces the world of bourgeois activity embodied by his brother-in-law Werner. Wilhelm explains why it is that the stage means all the world to him. Namely, it meant the world of the nobility, of good society—the public sphere as publicity of representation—as he states in the following passage:

A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will. Since the nobleman frequenting the society of the most polished, is compelled to give himself a polished manner; since this manner, neither door nor gate being shut against him, grows at last an unconstrained one; since, in court or camp, his figure, his person, are a part of his possessions, and it may be, the most necessary part,—he has reason enough to put some value on them, and to show that he puts some.

The nobleman was authority inasmuch as he made it present. He displayed it, embodied it in his cultivated personality; thus “He is a public persons and the more cultivated his movements, the more sonorous his voice, the more staid and measured his whole being is, the more perfect is he; … and whatever else there may be in him or about him, capacities, talents, wealth, all seem gifts of supererogation.” Goethe one last time caught the reflection of the representative publicness whose light, of course, was refracted in the French rococo court and refracted yet again in its imitation by the petty German princes. The different hues emerged all the more preciously: the appearance of the “lord,” who was “public” by virtue of representation, was stylized into the embodiment of gracefulness, and in this publicity he ceremoniously fashioned an aura around himself. Goethe again used “public person” in the traditional sense of public representation, although in the language of his age it had already taken on the more recent meaning of a servant of public authority or of a servant of the state. The “person,” however, was immediately modified into the “cultured personality.” Strictly speaking, the nobleman in the context of this letter served as something of a pretext for the thoroughly bourgeois idea of the freely self-actualizing personality that already showed the imprint of the neohumanism of the German classical period. In our context Goethe’s observation that the bourgeoisie could no longer represent, that by its very nature it could no longer create for itself a representative publicness, is significant. The nobleman was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced: “If the nobleman, merely by his personal carriage, offers all that can be asked of him, the burgher by his personal carriage offers nothing, and can offer nothing. The former has a right to seem: the latter is compelled to be, and what he aims at seeming becomes ludicrous and tasteless.” The representative bearing that the nouveau riche wanted to assume turned into a comical make-believe. Hence, Goethe advised not to ask him “‘What art thou?’ but only: ‘What hast thou? What discernment, knowledge, talent, wealth?’” This is a statement which Nietzsche’s later aristocratic pretensions adopted: a man proved himself not by what he could do, but by who he was.

Wilhelm confesses to his brother-in-law the need “to become a public person and to please and influence in a larger circle.” Yet since he is no nobleman and as a bourgeois also does not want to make the vain effort merely to appear to be one, he seeks out the stage as a substitute, so to speak, for publicity. Here lies the secret of his theatrical mission: “On the boards a polished man appears in his splendor with personal accomplishments, just as he does so in the upper classes of society.” It may well be that it was the secret equivocation of the “cultured personality” (“the necessity I feel to cultivate my mental faculties and tastes”), the bourgeois intention in the figure projected as a nobleman, that permitted the equation of theatrical performance with public representation. But in turn the perception of the disintegration of the representative publicness in bourgeois society was so much on the mark and the inclination to belong to it nevertheless so strong that there must be more to the matter than a simple equivocation. Wilhelm came before his public as Hamlet, successfully at first. The public, however, was already the carrier of a different public sphere, one that no longer had anything in common with that of representation. In this sense Wilhelm Meister’s theatrical mission had to fail. It was out of step, as it were, with the bourgeois public sphere whose platform the theatre had meanwhile become. Beaumarchais’s Figaro had already entered the stage and along with him, according to Napoleon’s famous words, the revolution.

3

On the Genesis of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

With the emergence of early finance and trade capitalism, the elements of a new social order were taking shape. From the thirteenth century on they spread from the northern Italian city-states to western and northern Europe and caused the rise first of Dutch centers for staple goods (Bruges, Lüttich, Brussels, Ghent, etc.) and then of the great trade fairs at the crossroads of long-distance trade. Initially, to be sure, they were integrated without much trouble by the old power structure. That initial assimilation of bourgeois humanism to a noble courtly culture, as we observe it paradigmatically during the rise of Florentine Renaissance society, must also be seen against this background. Early capitalism was conservative not only as regards the economic mentality so vividly described by Sombart (a characteristic way of doing business typified by “honorable” gain) but also as regards politics. As long as it lived from the fruits of the old mode of production (the feudal organization of agricultural production involving an enserfed peasantry and the petty commodity production of the corporatively organized urban craftsmen) without transforming it, it retained ambivalent characteristics. On the one hand this capitalism stabilized the power structure of a society organized in estates, and on the other hand it unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve. We are speaking of the elements of the new commercial relationships: the created by early capitalist long-distance trade.