The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Essay Questions

What is representative publicness?

Representative publicness is the form publicity takes in the Renaissance. At this time, publicness is associated with authorities that organize society, in particular the monarchy and the Church. These authorities display, or represent, their authority through public ceremonies, symbols, and other spectacles. This is not a kind of publicity in which everyday people engage in reciprocal dialogue. Rather, it is a kind of publicity aimed at demonstrating power.

How is the public sphere private?

Ironically, the bourgeois public sphere lies within the private realm along with the economy and the family. This is because the public sphere is composed of private individuals: those who are participating in the economy and have a family. That’s why the public sphere is private, because it is made up of private citizens. This is also what distinguishes the public sphere from the “public authorities,” Habermas’s name for state and religious authorities.

Describe how art and art criticism contributed to the development of the bourgeois public sphere.

Habermas argues that a central step in the formation of the public sphere was private individuals, or everyday citizens, starting to communicate about art. In talking about art, people learned how to have arguments and reasoned debates that were not serving the government or Church directly. This helped to build the public sphere as an autonomous space of discussion that will eventually come to have political effects as well. For, once people have developed norms and habits of critical dialogue, they can also start to discuss other topics such as the proper form of government and justice before the law.

What is the difference between displayed and critical publicity?

Displayed publicity is Habermas’s term for publicity in the 20th century or the age of mass media. In this form of publicity, political messages are communicated in order to be consumed like sound bites. You watch television and receive the message without having an opportunity to engage or debate it. This is in contrast to critical publicity, which is the function of the bourgeois public sphere in the early 19th century. In critical publicity, private individuals debate the affairs of the day.

What was Marx’s critique of the public sphere?

A principle of the public sphere is that it is open to all. This is what distinguishes it from something like the monarchy, for instance, which is based on a bloodline. Theoretically, anyone can participate in the public sphere regardless of their circumstances of birth. But Marx shows that the public sphere relies on criteria that essentially belong to middle-class ideals: you have to own property and be educated to participate. That means this “universal” space is actually only open to one class in society. The illusion of universalism masks an underlying class conflict.

Describe how economic depression contributed to the demise of the bourgeois public sphere.

With the economic depression of the late 1800s, states began to intervene more in the economy. Instead of allowing free trade across borders, they adopted “protectionist” policies that tried to maximize the profits of exports and minimize imports. In doing so, states got involved with something that was supposed to belong to the private sphere: the free market. In turn, private individuals no longer controlled the public sphere. The state increasingly gets to decide the nature of discussion and the terms of debate, because the state controls more and more areas of society.

What happened to the status of the family after the demise of the bourgeois public sphere?

As the state began to intervene more into private affairs like the economy, the family lost its special status. Under the bourgeois model, the economy (the social sphere) and the family (the intimate sphere) were in the same private realm together. Families cared for themselves while also participating in the market to support themselves. Now, the sphere of the family is divorced from the sphere of labor. A further consequence of this is that families no longer have complete control over “personal internalization,” which means, among other things, how children are raised and what a family believes. Now, people are influenced by social norms at large or state ideologies that the family does not control.

What is refeudalization?

For Habermas, the public sphere of the early 19th century was a rejection of a feudal model in which everything is controlled by the state, originally in the form of the king. But by the beginning of the 20th century, a kind of feudalism had returned, because now the state was entangled with the public sphere once more. In turn, the public sphere is not an autonomous space for discussing and critiquing the state, but rather a space in which citizens come to either approve or disapprove of what the state is selling them. Just like feudal peasants had to rely on the monarchy to meet their needs, now citizens rely on their government to give them services to which they are entitled as customers.

Explain the “illusion of publicity.”

The mass media of the 20th century provide the “illusion of publicity.” This means they seem public, since everyone can watch or listen to them, but they lack the crucial function of the public sphere: critical engagement. People do not participate in mass media as they did in the bourgeois public sphere. Rather than contributing arguments and dialogue, people merely consume these media.

What does Habermas say needs to happen to develop the critical aspect of the public sphere today?

Habermas thinks it may be possible to develop a new sense of critical engagement in the public sphere today, but two things need to happen. First, bureaucracy has to be minimized, so that politics isn’t just happening in closed government offices but is open to public debate. Second, people have to develop a new sense of “universal interest” or a commitment to building a world together rather than being fragmented by special interests. Habermas thinks both of these tasks are possible.