The
Midwest Faculty Seminar
presents
The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society (1962)
Jurgen
Habermas
March 3-5, 2005
The public sphere in Jurgen Habermas’ original use of the term
refers to the arena of discursive interaction that arose in bourgeois
society of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain,
France and Germany. More than four decades after the original publication
of Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit
(The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere), and sixteen years
since its translation into English, the concept of the “public
sphere” remains central, albeit controversial, to contemporary
accounts of the sociological conditions necessary for the growth of
a democratic polity. According to Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere
developed in tandem with the rise of the modern state and with the growth
of capitalist economies. For him, this public sphere provided a forum
distinct from both the state and official economic activity - a space
apart where citizens could participate politically in their community
through rational-critical discourse.
In its ideal form, the public sphere had the power to affirm or challenge
state authority through the self-generation of public opinion and attitudes.
Over time, this sphere, according to Habermas, was undermined by the
introduction of a series of social conditions that blurred the distinctions
between public and private and transformed the notion of an objective
general interest, generated by rational-critical debate, into a practice
of negotiated compromises among special interests. Mass consumer culture
and the competition among social institutions assumed primacy within
the public sphere signaling its segmentation and transformation into
an arena for advertising. For Habermas, the public sphere of the twentieth
century, and now the twenty-first century, was and is merely the illusion
of its former self; in the current ‘welfare state mass democracy,’
it has lost its critical function.
The Structural Transformation has received, particularly since its English
translation, copious amounts of attention by political and social theorists
and scientists, much of it critical on both practical and theoretical
levels. The narrow perspective adopted by Habermas in his definition
of the public sphere (e.g. bourgeois male) has instigated a rethinking
of that arena in an expanded discourse, one that includes both closer
historical attention to post-bourgeois models of the public sphere and
accounts for alternative public spheres, or ‘subaltern counterpublics.’
Issues such as nationalism and globalization, notably absent from Structural
Transformation but crucial for an understanding of contemporary politics,
have sparked new fields of critical inquiry into the notion of what
constitutes ‘the public.’
This seminar will revisit Habermas’ text in an effort to both
investigate the historiographical circumstances in which it was produced
and to explore its impact on subsequent social and political theories.
Furthermore, the seminar will seek to posit new questions in relation
to Habermas’ claims and to explore alternative frameworks to allow
for new channels to examine and problematize the public sphere. Can
the public sphere exist under vastly different cultural, socioeconomic
and political conditions? What power does ‘the public’ really
have in a postmodern democratic society? How can public debate be reanimated
through new forms of ‘opinion-forming associations’?
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