One of the first rank authors to define the centrality of public communication for politics and society was Jürgen Habermas. His discussion with Niklas Luhmann in the 80s and 90s of the 20th century placed communication as a central category within the social sciences. Although there were authors who had been working on communication, mass media, and cultural industry (Lazarsfeld, Lasswell, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Morin, Moles, to name a few), the philosophical weight of the discussion imposed by Habermas was decisive in elevating communication from being a minor category within the social sciences.
His earliest book on the subject is: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. It was published in German in 1962, and in English in 1989, under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Although Habermas began his academic career in 1956 as an assistant to Theodor Adorno at the University of Frankfurt, the book we are reviewing is Habermas’ habilitation thesis, defended in 1961 at the University of Marburg, under the supervision of Wolfgang Abendroth, a jurist and political scientist of great recognition at the time, whom Habermas explicitly acknowledges.
In this study, Habermas sought to understand the structural transformation of the public sphere (an aspect considered in the Catalan edition’s translation) and the principle of publicity from a Hegelian-Marxist perspective, while also taking into account the liberal point of view introduced in the works of Kant, Stuart Mill, and Tocqueville.
When delving into the concept of ‘bourgeois publicity’, one encounters a Habermas who is much more liberal than his social context might allow at that time. Especially considering his position within the group of members of the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research, as a research assistant to Theodor Adorno. Interestingly, contrary to what many may think, this first work shows a more evident Kantian influence rather than a Marxist one. Habermas defines the concepts of public opinion and the public sphere under the influence of Kantian ideas of rationality and publicity.
Habermas has already begun working on his fundamental work, which many years later will become his theory of communicative action. Under the influence of Kantian and Hegelian-Marxist categories, Habermas cannot explain how to achieve a critical public sphere that remains beyond the reach of the systematic domination of the market and the bureaucratic-absolutist state.
Thesis of the book
The book is a socio-historical investigation of the genesis and evolution of the public sphere, both as a cultural category and a social and political structure. In this development, Habermas presents the process by which the bourgeois public sphere transforms into the cultural principle and social structure that allows the transition from premodern to modern society. However, it undergoes further modifications in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when this public sphere, which was supposed to be a space for discussion and criticism, ends up organizing itself as the sphere of public opinion. In other words, it becomes a space of representation and emotional reaction activated by mass media and reflected in political opinion polls.
At the beginning of his text, Habermas provides a clear synthesis of his thoughts on the development of the Western public sphere:
On the one hand, the fiction of a discursive will-formation capable of dissolving domination has been effectively institutionalized for the first time in the political system of the bourgeois rule of law. On the other hand, the incompatibility of the imperatives of the capitalist economic system with the demands of a democratized will-formation process is revealed. The principle of publicity, which, based on a public consisting of private, educated, reasoning individuals who enjoy art and through the medium of the bourgeois press, was initially obtained with an unequivocally critical function against the secretive praxis of the absolutist state and anchored in the procedural forms of the rule of law’s organs, this principle is repurposed for demonstrative and manipulative ends. The network of communication through electronic mass media, woven increasingly densely, is organized today in such a way that, despite representing a technical potential for liberation, it serves more to control the loyalty of a depoliticized population than to subject state and social controls, in turn, to a decentralized discursive will-formation channeled in a consequential and barrier-free manner.Footnote1
Habermas does not explicitly define what the principle of publicity means. It can be deduced that it is a general guideline that regulates and defines the expected functioning of individuals in the public sphere. It is an institutionalized norm that determines how to achieve validity and legitimacy in the process of making certain topics public and resolving certain problems. The principle of publicity in a given society would encompass the set of assumptions and rules that govern how one should enter and exit the public stage, what should be said and what should not, who is qualified and authorized to speak, and what methods should be used to make social issues public.
According to Habermas, the so-called principle of publicity has evolved from one society to another in the following ways: rational conversation in ancient Greece, representativeness in the Middle Ages and Baroque period, the principle of ‘general access of the public’ in bourgeois society, and the principle of ‘notoriety’ in liberal capitalist society.
But in Habermas’s analysis of the genesis of the bourgeois principle of publicity, he exposes the contradictions that will later become more pronounced in liberal capitalist society. The bourgeois principle of publicity, institutionalized in the rule of law, came into conflict with the functioning pattern of the bourgeois class, according to Habermas. The bourgeois principle of publicity is the ‘general access’ of the public to matters that affect them as citizens of a state.
Habermas draws on Rousseau’s categories to focus attention on what he considers the deepest contradiction in the functioning of the bourgeois public sphere, in light of the principle of general access. Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ is a category that is defined in terms of the subjective will of individuals, the private interests of those who act within the social sphere. Rousseau does not believe that there is enough rationality in this concept to make democratic decisions. Therefore, Habermas distinguishes these two categories from Rousseau through the concepts of truth and will. Truth should be the basis of power, while will should be abandoned in favor of reason. The conclusion is that this did not happen in the bourgeois rule of law: majorities are imposed solely by the effect of the simple summation of the wills of individual citizens, as private individuals driven by their particular interests, often disconnected from true public affairs.
And will fulfills the function of the foundation of the principle of publicity in bourgeois society because the principle of general access, knowledge, and argumentation on public issues prescribed by modern law and philosophy, is abandoned in favor of notoriety. The principle of publicity of ‘general access’ transformed into ‘notoriety’ as a way to connect the parliament with the electorate: voters would support their representatives based on their notoriety, on what they did, on what they said, in other words, as long as they themselves were notorious. The Constitutions of the rule of law began to safeguard the laws that formed the foundation of this concept of publicity: freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association.
Notoriety, then, transformed into a principle from the moment it applied to decision-making in the Rule of Law. Courses of action were developed that were previously presented to the public. Projects or advertised actions, that is, notorious ones, acquired public status simply by the fact of having been exposed in the public arena.
The difference between the two principles of publicity is also the result of the expansion and social and demographic growth of capitalist society, to the extent that critical discussions and conversations would have fewer and fewer chances of impacting major political decisions. The bourgeois space for discussion, almost assimilated to the Greek agora, had no future in a mass society with politics for the masses.
Philosophy and the principle of publicity
Based on this socio-historical analysis of the principle of publicity, Habermas revisits the problem from the perspective of Kantian, Hegelian-Marxist, and liberal political philosophy.
Habermas relies on Kant to support an optimistic perspective: public reason and the publicity of ideas are the mechanisms for improving human life. He shows that the impact Rousseau’s ideas had on Kant is related to this way of understanding the problem of publicity in the Enlightenment.
Then he turns to Marx (in his more Hegelian version) to present a critique of the Kantian model. For Marx, public discussion cannot take place among individual subjects of universal rationality. Productive structures condition the orientation of public discussion and the formation of civil society. The lack of awareness of being part of production relations is what undermines the legitimacy of the public sphere from Marx’s perspective, which Habermas considers questions the Kantian view. Power relations originating in production relations continue to affect processes of discussion and argumentation. Ultimately, Habermas uses Marx as the materialist counterpart to Kant’s idealist vision. Habermas needs to start from real conditions of social and economic life to frame the sphere of publicity within a social structure. And he finds this in Marx.
Finally, Habermas looks at the problem from a liberal perspective. Mill and Tocqueville will be the chosen ones to confront Kant and Marx. Unlike Kant, liberals do not believe in the public use of reason in the Kantian sense. They consider the public sphere and public opinion as mechanisms of social pressure, the ‘pressure of the street’. And furthermore, they do not disagree with its existence and deployment in that way. And here they go against Marx’s arguments. Power cannot be dissolved as Marxist thought believed it could be if publicity and the public sphere, with their ideas and arguments, acted upon production and power relations.
The transformation of the structure of publicity
Another important point in the work is the author’s analysis of the process of change, transformation, and institutionalization of different structures of publicity between bourgeois society and liberal capitalist society. Habermas explains the transformation process by showing the transition that occurs from ‘the mercantile traffic of private news’ to ‘journalistic news traffic’. It starts with the leaks that escape from the news circulating through private mail. Before achieving a system of public communication through newspapers, merchants and officials used a ‘professional correspondence system’ organized by the merchants themselves to obtain frequent and accurate information about distant markets. On the other hand, at the same time that this system of public information was beginning to take shape, the monopoly of violence was forming with the establishment of national armies and the fiscal state. The combination of a publicity system based on the press for political and economic news was starting to form a much more powerful and strong state.
Thus, a process of polarization originated: on one hand, there were the officials of the national state, directing and administering power through concentrated violence and the permanent collection of taxes, and on the other hand, individuals with private interests that the state sought to regulate. This regulatory pretension became the main element of conflict. Previously, the difference between the public and the private was decisive and clear. But when the state transformed into the representative of public affairs and sought to control individuals and private matters from its structures, a zone of indeterminate characteristics separated the public sphere from the private sphere. This was called the ‘social sphere’. In Habermas’ words: ‘those private interests that everyone shares are the interests that come together within the sphere of the social’.
Finally, the public sphere or sphere of discussion and criticism was transformed by changes in private life, the shaping of the state, and the form that publicity structures acquired. These structures adopted the rules of the market, and the individuals or rational subjects of Kantian discussion, or the proletarians who were supposed to present their discourse of rupture in assembly spaces, were transformed into ‘consumers’ of cultural products.
Origin, reception, and impact
The book has been an essential reference for studying and researching the problem of the public sphere, the political public sphere, and political publicity for decades. It is difficult for anyone to embark on a study of the public sphere without referencing this work, even today. In this study, one can find traces of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, a text that expresses the intertwining of the philosophical, the political, the historical, and the sociological to explain the problem of the importance of the public in relation to the political.
From another perspective, but aiming for something similar, in Critique and Crisis Reinhart Koselleck analyzes the origin of the bourgeois world and the transformation of society, emphasizing the private networks of communication and discussion within Masonic sects.
Especially in the last part of his narrative, Habermas is prepared to analyze the functioning of mass communication with authors such as Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihú Katz, Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann. The modern sociology of mass communication, both American and European, and the analysis with a professional touch are elements he considers to delineate the social process of transformation of the social sphere in modernity.
It can be said that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is better understood today, after reading the author’s later work, The Theory of Communicative Action, than at the time of its publication in 1962. It seems that Habermas could never escape the influence of communication and its effects on the quality of political life in human societies. This work, which during the 20th century was considered an inspiring study for the analysis of political communication within the Rule of Law, can now also represent a historical example of how the structures and principles of publicity at the collective level of society connect to produce positive or negative effects on individuals, social groups, and organizations. Reflection on current digital communication networks, social media platforms, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence also modifies publicity and the public sphere in a certain direction.
Professors of Communication Theory, Faculty of Communication, Universidad Austral, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina
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Notes
1 The quote has been translated into English from the Spanish edition: Historia y crítica de la opinión pública. La transformación estructural de la vida pública, translated by Antonio Doménech with the collaboration of Rafael Grasa. 1986. Mexico: Gustavo Gili.