in fairy tale language for a class assignment
In a distant past, there existed a feudal society, and in this society, there was not yet a public sphere.
In fact, public referred to nobility, and everyone else was common, However, with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeois class came the commercial trade in news, and a public sphere began to emerge between the private sphere of life and the government.
This public sphere was composed of the bourgeoisie, mostly male property owners, who used reason to debate public issues, In western Europe and America, these citizens engaged in dialogue in coffee shops, newspapers, and letters that is, they debated in largely private spaces that created publics.
Public opinion began to develop, but this wasnt the public opinion we conceive of today: instead, it was formed through public debate, not through polling or other more modern mechanisms.
An aim of the public sphere was to abolish the domination of the state, and constitutional governments were set up to connect the law to public opinion.
A central value of the bourgeois public sphere was inclusiveness that as the bourgeoisie grew, so too would access to the public sphere, However, as the public enlarged, public opinion changed from the result of ongoing dialogue to a coercive force, This is largely because as the liberal state became a welfare state, it encroached on the private lives of people, or “stateized” societythe public sphere became less politicized.
In part, this was caused as economic struggles became political struggles, and the state began to protect families and individuals, through education, workers rights laws, and welfare.
Consumer culture also arose, so that a debating public sphere was replaced by an advertising public sphere public debate became administered and consumed, The state began to “address its citizens like consumers”, Public opinion and propaganda began to be used in order to gain good will and justify legislation, The public sphere became “refeudalized” by the state and others looking to gain publicity,
The bourgeois public sphere has since passed away, and in its stead we have the modern notions of public opinion and publicity, as well as private individuals not engaged in a public, rational debate.
Good bye, dear bourgeois public sphere, You are missed. Finally finished this book. Slow going, but very concrete, well grounded in historical trends, This is one of those that you have to sit with for quite some time after reading in order to realize how sheer and allencompassing its critiques are.
Habermas' bourgeois pubic sphere is a seminal contribution to the Frankfurt School, It's not the easiest read and the most interesting material is frontloaded but Habermas' first major work remains interesting half a century after it was published,
After a definition of terms, he moves onto a multichapter review of the history of the development of critical public debate, its gradual broadening to include more segments of the rapidly expanding bourgeoisie, and then its coalescing into the origins of constitutional states.
The focus is primarily France
and England with
some acknowledgement of Germany's slow development, disappointingly ignoring most developments elsewhere in the Occident,
This could have served as its own book and perhaps should have as a more thorough examination and a broadening of the analysis would have made some of his later arguments more convincing.
However, dividing up the book would belie the fact that this is, at its core, a philosophical work,
The second half shows the deep influence Adorno had on young Juergen as it lays out the ways in which the social welfare state and the corporate media compromise or destroy the existence of a true public sphere and propagandize the populace into a sort of political universe of false choices.
The argument is a decent read, but overstated and ascribes too much agency to messy bureacracies and too little to individuals, In that way, he occasionally sounds almost libertarian,
The work isn't without its problems, Habermas is particularly weak when he uses the bourgeois family structure as a model for the ideology of the bourgeois state e, g. , in Chapter. While his tone makes every attempt to be even throughout, one does find him slipping into utopian idealism: he really has a fondness for the bourgeoisie of the lateth century and even hints that, really, the only problem with a ruling class is a practical one of proportionate representation from all segments of society.
But this is a book of analysis and not solutions, the fact of which left me feeling unsatisfied through the second half, Perhaps in this mediatized culture I have become so accustomed to punditry that its absence leaves me feeling empty, Perhaps. But perhaps it's also that a book of this scope and insight could benefit from a little speculative futurism,
I remember reading a review somewhere on the internet that argued that the internet made this text irrelevant, but while the internet fulfills C, W. Mills' criteria for a critical public, I think Habermas would argue that it is shot through with the sort of publicity that already infects the rest of mediatized culture.
Look at the talking points cut and pasted into any comments thread on gun violence in the United States the wording is almost always so wellpracticed, and it becomes clear that the repetition of this ritual text is an extension of the ubiquitous publicity of nonpublic interests and political parties.
It's sloganeering, not critical debate, and the goal is clearly political domination and not consensus and compromise,
A young Habermas would have likely despaired at the quality of modern discourse given the possibilities inherent in the tools, but he's no Adorno and has grown and evolved since these early days.
I look forward to reading more of his early work, but I'm going to need some lighter philosophy as a palate cleanser before doing so, .