The Public Sphere

Reading Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) fifty years after its initial publication, one can’t help but be struck by the work’s blindness to the gendered dimensions of the bourgeois public sphere. Not only does Habermas ignore the ways in which this sphere was founded on the exclusion of women, who were confined to the private, ¹ he does this while acknowledging other exclusionary aspects of the bourgeois public sphere—its exclusion of workers and peasants—and while valorizing the bourgeois family for providing a space of intimacy for the private individuals who would come together in public to discuss matters of common concern. ² So it isn’t just that the young Habermas doesn’t take into account the ways in which the subordination of women is implicated in the formation of the bourgeois public sphere whose lost promise he hopes to recover, nor is it that he is wholly blind to its ideological dimensions. Rather, he appears to be selectively blind to gender subordination. For the feminists who engaged with STPS upon its translation into English—especially those who were veterans of the disputes between Marxists and feminists in the 1970s over whether feminism was a bourgeois distraction from the real business of socialist revolution—this selective blindness must have touched a nerve. To be fair to Habermas, none of those debates had happened yet when he wrote STPS—in that sense, the book is, like all books, a product of its time—but there can be little doubt the reception of his work by American feminist theory was filtered through their lens.

Once one decides to read STPS through the lens of feminist theory, however, the de facto exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere appears rather obvious. But feminist critics of the work made a stronger point, namely, that the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere is not accidental or contingent but rather constitutive of that space. If the bourgeois public sphere is constitutively exclusionary, then as Nancy Fraser puts it in her extremely influential feminist critique of STPS, “we can no longer assume that the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also an ideological notion” that served to rationalize an historically emergent form of class, race, and gender domination. ³

In response to this line of criticism, Habermas not only acknowledges that the bourgeois public sphere excludes women, perhaps surprisingly, he also bites the bullet and accepts that this exclusion is a constitutive rather than a contingent feature of the bourgeois public sphere. Although the exclusion of women shares some features with the exclusion of workers and peasants, “unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men,” Habermas concedes, “the exclusion of women had a structuring significance.” ⁴ And yet, the feminist argument for the constitutively exclusionary nature of the bourgeois public sphere does not, Habermas insists, “dismiss rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere’s self-interpretation, but rather appeals to them.” ⁵ In other words, in claiming the bourgeois public sphere is founded upon the constitutive exclusion of women, feminists implicitly appeal to the core ideals of that very public sphere—inclusion and equal participation. What’s more, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere have a potential for self-transformation that allows the public sphere itself to be transformed through its contact with social movements such as the feminist movement. ⁶ The bourgeois public sphere may be ideological, but it is not mere ideology. ⁷

This suggests that the proper response to the feminist critique is not to reject the ideal of the public sphere altogether, but rather to reformulate the liberal-bourgeois conception of it that Habermas articulates in STPS and to develop an alternative, post-bourgeois conception. ⁸ Fraser delineates four specific assumptions of the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in order to make the concept serviceable for feminist critical theory. First, the bourgeois model assumes incorrectly that it is possible for people to bracket existing status hierarchies and participate as if they were peers in public discussions of matters of common concern; against this assumption, and in line with some of Habermas’s own reflections at the end of STPS, Fraser insists that social equality is a necessary condition for political democracy. ⁹ Second, in STPS, Habermas tends to speak as if a single overarching universal public sphere is necessary for a well-functioning democracy; ¹⁰ in contrast, Fraser contends that a multiplicity of counterpublic spheres is preferable, especially in societies that are riven by pervasive social hierarchies. ¹¹ Third, Fraser questions the assumption that public discourse should be restricted to deliberation about matters of common concern; instead, she argues, the questions of what counts as a matter of common concern and who is able to draw and defend boundaries between public and private must themselves be open to discursive debate in public, such that we can’t ever draw this line in any final way. ¹² Fourth, Fraser questions the assumption that a well-functioning public sphere depends upon a sharp separation between civil society and state; to the contrary, we need to make a distinction between weak and strong publics—the former being the site of opinion and will formation and the latter being the locus of political decision making—and theorize their interrelation. ¹³

Later, in his monumental work of legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms, ¹⁴ Habermas reformulates his conception of the public sphere, taking on board some—but not all—aspects of this revised, post-bourgeois conception of the public sphere. Specifically, he picks up Fraser’s notion of subaltern counterpublics with his account of “alternative” publics as sites of critical publicity, he explicitly adopts her distinction between weak and strong publics, and he strengthens his account of the relationship between social equality and political democracy with his analysis of the co-implication of public and private autonomy. ¹⁵ Indeed, he now takes feminist debates over equality to provide the primary example for the necessity of securing public and private autonomy together. ¹⁶ As he puts it: “no [legal] regulation, however sensitive to context, can adequately concretize the equal right to an autonomous private life unless it simultaneously strengthens the position of women in the political public sphere and thereby augments participation in forms of political communication that provide the sole arenas in which citizens can clarify the relevant aspects that define equal status.” ¹⁷ Hence, Habermas’s subsequent developments of public sphere theory seem to bear out the claim that his account of the public sphere can be reformulated to serve feminist ends.

However, subsequent historical, political, and theoretical developments in the intervening two decades have raised new questions about the constitutive exclusions and ideological distortions at work in even this reformulated version of public sphere theory. Under pressure to make sense of current conditions of globalization, feminist theory, political theory, and critical theory have all undergone a global turn, and this turn has once again thrown the concept of the public sphere open to debate. This global turn reveals a different set of exclusions in Habermas’s public sphere theory. Even in its reformulated version, presented in Between Facts and Norms, this model implicitly presupposes what Fraser calls a “Westphalian political imaginary” in the sense that it tacitly assumes the relevant frame for the public sphere to be that of “a bounded political community with its own territorial state.” ¹⁸ Precisely this frame can no longer be presupposed in light of current conditions of transnational publicity. In other words, under current conditions of globalization, the public sphere has undergone—and is still undergoing—a new structural transformation. ¹⁹

In his recent work in political theory, in particular in his theoretical and political reflections on the European Union and on the prospects for the constitutionalization of international law, Habermas has reflected on this transformation. With respect to Europe, drawing on his argument about the role of the public sphere in securing democratic legitimacy in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas argues that the administrative and political power of the EU can have democratic legitimacy only to the extent that it is rooted in a—not yet existing—European public sphere. ²⁰ Against Euro-skeptics, Habermas argues that European political integration need not be based on a pre-existing European identity; rather, the requisite forms of European political identity and civic solidarity could be generated in a suitably configured transnational European public sphere. ²¹

With respect to the global public sphere, Habermas worries that the emerging communicative structures of informal global public spheres cannot be efficacious so long as there are no constitutionally institutionalized mechanisms for translating the public will generated in such spheres into binding political power. The global protests against the start of the Iraq war in 2003 provided a poignant example of this efficacy deficit. Nevertheless Habermas is cautiously optimistic that the opinions and wills generated in such global public spheres could be efficacious if directed at a global institution—a dramatically reformed UN—that would be charged with the limited goals of preventing violence and protecting human rights and empowered with the political muscle to achieve those goals. To be democratically legitimate, such a global institution would have to be rooted in a global public sphere, but such a sphere need not be held together by thick forms of political identity or civic solidarity; rather, “shared moral outrage over gross violations of human rights provides a sufficient basis for solidarity among world citizens” and the achievement of such a thin form of global solidarity is not, in Habermas’s view, an “insuperable hurdle.” ²²

To be sure, one might be much more skeptical than Habermas is about the current prospects for developing either European civic solidarity—especially in light of the ongoing financial crisis in Europe—or a global agreement on what constitute human rights violations or unjustified uses of violence in international relations. ²³ However, even setting these difficult issues aside, important questions can be raised about the normative legitimacy of these emerging transnational and global publics. ²⁴ Consider that participants in transnational and global public spheres are not fellow citizens who enjoy equal political status, even in a formal sense, and that the structure of transnational and global public spheres favors elites who have the material and symbolic resources needed for global communication, ²⁵ and who possess the requisite linguistic skills, including the ability to communicate in English. ²⁶ In light of massive global inequalities, we have to wonder whether the opinions and wills debated and formed in emerging transnational and global public spheres could possibly be legitimate, in the sense of inclusive of all affected and allowing for genuine parity of participation. ²⁷ One might even wonder about whether public sphere theory itself is too bound to its European Enlightenment context—and thus too entangled with the legacies of colonialism and imperialism—ever to be fully attentive to these power dynamics.

This latter question has emerged in an interesting way in response to Fraser’s transnational, post-Westphalian reconstruction of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. ²⁸ Fraser’s critics point out the extent to which her strategy of grounding the normativity of her conception of the public sphere historically—rather than in an ideal theory—renders her account particularly vulnerable to such worries. Given this broadly speaking Hegelian normative strategy, which Fraser shares with Habermas, the particular version of history one tells matters a great deal. As Hutchings puts this point with respect to Fraser (though it is equally, if not more, true of Habermas): this “is a future-oriented vision, informed by a range of assumptions about where we have come from and where we are going (and therefore who’s in front and who’s behind). This is a story that reflects the specific political imaginary that is closely tied up with the experience of Western modernity in general, and the fate of liberal-capitalist welfare states in the latter part of the 20th century in particular.” ²⁹ In other words, it isn’t enough for public sphere theory to be recast in a broader, transnational, post-Westphalian frame, as important and pressing as this project is; we also need to interrogate the implicit assumptions and ideological distortions—about history, modernity, progress, enlightenment, and ultimately about the relationship between United States, Europe, and the rest of the world—that inform its normative underpinnings. ³⁰

However, even if we assume, with Fraser’s critics, that the post-bourgeois, post-Westphalian conception of the transnational and global public sphere is ideological, this still leaves us with a version of the question that Habermas first posed fifty years ago in STPS: is it merely ideology? In other words, can the concept of the public sphere be reconstructed in a way that makes it serviceable for a critical theory that has adopted not just a transnational and post-Westphalian but also a postcolonial perspective? I cannot answer this question here. But in closing I would just like to note that answering this question will require critically interrogating the modernist theory of history that underpins the normativity of Habermasian critical theory. ³¹ In confronting this question, we will also have to be careful not to presuppose that we know how inclusion and equality in the context of neocolonial and neoimperial power relations is possible, that we know what form it will take and what rules or procedures will structure it, for doing so threatens to obscure rather than to illuminate the ideological nature and functions of our current conception of the public sphere.