On Liberal Ambivalence

I

If liberal civil society and its public was distinctively bourgeois, it also was relatively compact, for the public sphere was a site for exchanges among a diminutive minority who belonged neither to traditional landed or military social classes, and who possessed property, education, and cultivation. Unlike feudal arrangements, membership was not inaccessible or closed in any principled way, only by the possession of these material and cultural assets. One result, Habermas argued, was that with the trend of democratization, with which both Mill and Tocqueville were concerned, the public sphere’s very extension was a crucial aspect of its undoing.

This paradox lies at the heart of Transformation. The first half of the book explains how a zone for private discourse and deliberation—a site with autonomy from rulers and the state, and within which reasoned opinion could become a source of free-standing influence—had developed out of aesthetic and literary institutions. Chapter Fifteen closes the section dealing with this class-specific “Bourgeois Public Sphere” that had “evolved in the tension-charged field between state and society . . . in such a way that it remained itself a part of the private realm.” ² It also serves as the prolegomenon for the book’s account of decline in the next section on “The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” which Habermas delineates as a process of fragmentation as the public divides into many publics.

The core source of this doleful waning, he argued, was the tightly linked combination of capitalist development and the egalitarian widening of political participation that it provoked. As a result, the region of opinion took in an ever more heterogeneous population, and the public interest divided into a plethora of competing private and targeted interests, sometimes even exploding into violent clashes. As a result, political life lost a most valuable critical vantage.

With diverse special interests coming to attach themselves to state rulers and their public policies, modernity curiously came more to resemble feudalism, and less like early modern Europe, as it lost its grip on the conditions of scale and the abilities required for quality and privacy. Not just the caliber of public discourse, but the very “fundamental separation of the two spheres” of state and society was called into question. More and more, the frontier where they met became segmented, semipublic and semiprivate, occupied by masses rather than by persons, and open to staged spectacles and much manipulation. A crucial location that once served to elaborate criteria for public evaluation while limiting conflicts of interest to achieve common purposes lost its material presuppositions. The trust that had been generated by interests shared by the bourgeoisie could not be sustained when new forms of class formation overwhelmed its unitary basis and conduced a proliferation of political speech and propaganda that pushed once private discussions into the full glare of public pressure, where compromise and reasonable consensus based on deliberation became vastly more difficult to achieve.

This was Habermas’s version of the classic Frankfurt School position about late capitalism and the ways it forestalls opposition and resistance. Later, as Cohen and Arato have observed, Habermas recast the various strands of the Frankfurt School into a fresh theoretical position about contemporary democracy and its possibilities, but in this early work, his analysis was tightly linked to the thesis of decline found in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s writing. ³ To make his case for the dissipation of the public sphere, Habermas summoned Mill and Tocqueville as nineteenth-century contemporaries who witnessed its unhappy transformation, and who produced ideas that measured the transition from an arena largely delimited to the propertied and the rational to a much more capacious but less unitary sphere occupied by many more persons, less deep knowledge and intellectual training, and wider patterns of assembly.

In a move both surprising and compelling, Habermas connected their critique to an account of social class. The era’s socialists, he noted, were surprised to discover how “the extension of equal political rights to all social classes proved to be possible within the framework of this class society itself.” ⁴ As observers of how both democracy and pluralism were beginning to overwhelm the once-contained, more bourgeois public sphere, Mill, Tocqueville, and other liberals found themselves in a bind. They understood these trends to be uncontainable and, in many respects, desirable. Yet they also were apprehensive and skeptical. Much as Habermas would himself write in later work, they saw much potential for modern democracy and civil society while questioning the prospects of an enlarged public as being able to properly participate in a sphere of rational exchange.

Both authors rightly were placed by Habermas at the crossroads of this contradiction. Caught between the legacies of a class-specific bourgeois sphere within which critical reasoned discourse to discover a public interest could proceed in a vibrant press and in a growing number of gathering places, and the emerging social trends of a more complex, inclusive, democratic modern society that threatened to undermine the presuppositions of opinion formation within the private civil sphere, these liberal thinkers, he convincingly observed, were of two minds about this zone of social life and its larger meaning. Committed to reason as the proper criterion for membership in a deliberative citizenry, they had to come to terms with an empirical political upheaval that was radically widening the scope of participation.

Habermas does not neglect this deep ambivalence in Transformation. The text’s emphasis, however, is primarily one-sided, as its prose stands on the side of stressing the various ways Mill and Tocqueville drew attention to the high price that was being exacted by developments after the French Revolution, extending to the middle of the nineteenth century. Habermas deployed these understandings to undergird his own arguments about the reduction of public understanding and the transformation of opinion from a place of reason to a site marked by compulsion.

Mill witnessed how Chartism and electoral reform were bringing an unpropertied, less-skilled working class into political life. Quoting from On Liberty, Habermas underscored how Mill’s sociological observations underpinned his doubts about the “growing yoke of public opinion” and its “moral means of coercion” ⁵ :

In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organs of the tendencies and instincts of the masses. . . . And what is still a greater novelty, the masses do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers.

In such circumstances marked by a plurality of competing ideas, Habermas averred, Mill had no choice but to turn to toleration, as distinct from deliberative reason’s search for a single public interest.

Habermas also stressed how “Tocqueville shared Mill’s conception of ‘Representative Government’,” especially the idea that public opinion under these new conditions, as Tocqueville evocatively put the point, had become “more and more mistress to the world,” with “strange power” in the emerging democracies. ⁶ Having closely observed the workings of an America “born equal,” a country where no barriers of lineage or property confined democratic citizenship for white men, Tocqueville argued and Habermas similarly underlined how the result not only was a tyrannical majority, but a deterioration in the quality of political speech and choice. “The majority in the United States,” Democracy in America announces in one of only two paragraphs cited by Habermas, “takes over the business of supplying the individual with a quantity of ready-made opinions and so relieves him of the necessity of forming his own. So there are many theories of philosophy, morality, and politics which everyone adopts unexamined on the faith of public opinion.” ⁷ On this reading, one that presages Alan Kahan’s designation of both as aristocratic liberals, ⁸ Mill and Tocqueville considered the meaning of free expression to have shifted ground. While once a protection for informed and rational deliberation, it had become a way to “protect the nonconformists,” as Habermas put the point, “from the grip of the public itself.” ⁹

With this exegesis of Mill and Tocqueville, Habermas observed that “the bourgeois constitutional state was interpreted . . . for the first time by liberalism” under circumstances marked by how the bourgeois public “was subverted by the propertyless and uneducated masses,” and how public opinion “had been perverted from an instrument of liberation into an agent of repression.” ¹⁰ On this reading, leading nineteenth-century liberals, like the proverbial canary in the mine, were the first to apprehend and properly assess the tragic loss that was convened by the end of the high bourgeois moment. Ever since, Habermas then thought, as capitalism has come to be more organized, the control of politics by a judicious reasoning public has been lost decisively and permanently.

II

He might have noted the intellectual friendship, including correspondence and long discussions in London in which Tocqueville took the lead, between his two principal liberal thinkers. ¹¹ If Habermas had done so, he might have inverted the order of presentation, since it was Tocqueville—called “the Montesquieu of our times” and lauded by Mill in his Autobiography—who influenced Mill’s views, rather more than the other way around, even if the degree of influence long has been a subject of debate amongst historians of ideas. ¹² Between 1835 and 1840, the dates of publication for both volumes of Democracy in America, Mill closely attended to what Tocqueville was writing both about France in an 1836 chronicle of the history of centralized government he wrote for Mill’s Westminster Review, and about American mores and institutions, especially the tyranny of the majority.

But as Mill’s 1840 review of volume two of Democracy made clear, he did not subscribe, at least not in any simple or portable way, to this aspect of Tocqueville’s argument. “It is perhaps the greatest defect of M. de Tocqueville’s book,” Mill wrote, notwithstanding his view that the volume “represented a new era in the scientific study of politics” (a celebration “less in the conclusions than in the mode of arriving at them”),

that from the scarcity of examples, his propositions, even when derived from observation, have the air of mere abstract speculations. He speaks of the tyranny of the majority in general phrases, but gives hardly any instances of it, nor much information as to the mode in which it is practically exemplified. The omission was in the present instance the more excusable, as the despotism complained of was, at that time, politically at least, an evil in apprehension more than in sufferance; and he was uneasy rather at the total absence of security against the tyranny of the majority, than at the frequency of its actual exertion. ¹³

Striking features of this extended and largely laudatory review by Mill include discussions of the implications of Democracy in America for British society, especially its emerging liberal tradition, and the importance for his country’s new circumstances of the emergence both of the working and middle classes (all the while upbraiding Tocqueville for the absence of class analysis). Written at a time Mill was seeking to understand the necessary social basis for a successful liberal party, and following a decade in which he had been writing about French politics for the radical English press, he portrayed the emerging middle class as the central element of a new majority in a democracy of an extended, but not working-class, franchise; the class that would underpin liberal victories against aristocratic tradition. The consciousness and ideological mind-set of this middle class, Mill believed, would sustain a healthy liberalism, and thus guard against any excesses of democracy while superseding Britain’s conservative ancien régime. ¹⁴ In all, as Nadia Urbinati has emphasized, Mill disagreed with Tocqueville about the potential causes of mediocrity under democratic conditions. He did not think it was an extension of the people in a regime increasingly characterized by popular sovereignty that could serve as the source of such a danger; rather, the proper rejoinder was for democracy to be more democratic in its practices, at least as far as the middle class was concerned. ¹⁵

Read this way, it seems clear that Habermas’s portrayal of Mill’s complex views on democratization and the public sphere is excessively one-sided, for it too assertively sets aside the faith Mill expressed in the capacity of a more extended and more democratic politics to make representative government and liberty more, not less, robust. To be sure, Mill did worry about mediocrity under modern conditions, which he believed was a source of concern as a result of what he called “the unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit,” ¹⁶ and he did seek mechanisms to counteract the dangers of homogeneity in such ideas as plural voting and proportional representation. But he refused to endorse what he believed to be the too simple view of Tocqueville concerning the tyranny of the majority; thus his development of toleration as a central mechanism as well as a normative goal was not, as Habermas portrayed it, a second-best option born of resignation but a welcome hallmark of the new British polity, one that was radical, liberal, middle-class, and likely to be characterized by a wide diversity of ideas.

I am struck less by the similarities in position with Mill that Habermas highlighted than with crucial differences. In Mill, there was no nostalgia for an old order, whether aristocratic or bourgeois in a limited sense, or for a far more limited public sphere. For sure, he saw new dangers, many of which he associated with a premature working class projection into political life, but he also discerned corrective mechanisms in the active participation of members of the growing and varied middle class, whose very participation and practice of citizenship, he thought, would lead to a tempering of political conflict by a sense of a common good.

Tocqueville, by contrast, never shook off an appreciation for France’s lost world or the ideas their leading members had held in common. Nonetheless, this appreciation for a past order of the noblesse hardly added up to any longing for a specifically bourgeois public sphere. However potentially attractive, Tocqueville knew there was no going back. For that reason, he focused so fully on the anxieties of American democracy and the implications of that experiment well beyond its borders. Understanding that the structures, experiences, dispositions, and patterns of action he found in the United States were harbingers of things to come elsewhere, he did more than enumerate the hazards, as Habermas properly suggests he did. At least equally important, and much like Mill, Tocqueville searched for effective countercurrents to secure democracy’s advantages. ¹⁷

His primary solution to problems posed by the declining role of elites and a potential tyranny of the majority was a robust, varied, modern civil society that is marked by lively associational life. Drawing empirically on the American example, Tocqueville celebrated democracy’s capacity to fashion an enlarged civil domain, and he looked favorably on exactly the feature of fragmentation that would so concern Habermas. Like James Madison, Tocqueville admired how a polity characterized by a separation of powers, bicameralism, and federalism broke up any prospect of a unified perspective.

Most important was his discovery of the powers of voluntary associations, which were rapidly expanding in number and type in the United States. This growth offered an effective institutional answer to worries the Founders had expressed about how such combinations might detract from the common good. The proliferation of a great web of associations, as Olivier Zunz has argued, provided Tocqueville’s central “answer to his nagging worries about democracy and despotism.” As a guarantee against the oppression of a new majority power, these sources of initiative married interest and virtue, and tempered the worst aspects of both through the exercise of a liberty of association. ¹⁸

Reading chapter fifteen, one would not know that Tocqueville concluded that with such mechanisms to counter the dangers of the new equality, and though “liberty fails to execute its projects with the same degree of perfection as does intelligent despotism,” as he wrote in his notebook while conducting research in Philadelphia in 1831, “in the long run it produces a greater result,” for “it does diffuse throughout the social body an activity, a strength, an energy that would not exist without it, and which works miracles.” ¹⁹ So much for the idea that his liberal ambivalence amounted to a rejection of the enlarged public sphere!

III

As Tocqueville was getting ready to send Mill his second volume of Democracy, he asked his friend to “bear in mind, while reading the book, that it is written in a country and for a country where, equality having triumphed irreversibly and aristocracy having disappeared entirely, the main task from now on will be to fight the pernicious qualities of the new order, not to bring that order about.” ²⁰ Nor was the task to return to an older order, with a narrower public sphere. Mill likewise perceived democracy’s dangers but was convinced it was possible to do more than find antidotes. Within limits to be sure, both seized on a range of ideas about organizations and rules that could make felicitous a marriage between liberalism and an enlarging democracy. To advance that task, they placed the creation of thick institutions joined to norms and practices of extended participation at the center of their particular kind of liberalism. ²¹

Habermas, of course, comprehended their project’s inherent tensions, but he chose to dramatically highlight those aspects that concerned danger and decline. This crucial discussion in Transformation reveals how that seminal volume found itself unable to escape the tendency that dated back to prewar Frankfurt School Marxism and was elaborated after World War Two, an inclination to underscore the limits and barriers to a robust public life in organized late capitalism and the concomitant bureaucratic organization of the modern state. As a result, the text underestimates how, in circumstances of complexity and differentiation, liberalism in fact can develop as a site of contestation and potential change. The lessons Mill and Tocqueville sought to impart were not simply those of menace and decline, but instruction to attend to the emergence of a new public sphere whose vitality we either will cherish and advance or face the prospect of ever greater desolation.