Habermas begins his book, The Structural Transformation, with a detailed investigation of the historical and legal uses of the terms “public” and “private.” The discussion ranges from the practices of antiquity, through the feudal ages, and into the bourgeois period. However, the discourse of public and private is inadequate to explain the bourgeois “public use of reason,” and to make up this deficit he resorts to a structural argument based in gender relations. Though the structural argument actually disrupts his narrative of public and private, the diachronic dimensions of his argument remain dominant and the structural argument—despite its crucial importance—remains underthematized. My aim in this part of the essay is to show why Habermas’s narrative requires supplementation by the structural argument.
According to his diachronic account, the “public use of reason” was historically rooted in the art of rational-critical public debate which bourgeois intellectuals had learned from encounters with courtly-noble society. The latter, having gained increasing independence from the court, became a cultural-political force in the “town” where it played an important role in the promotion of institutions devoted to reading and discussion—the coffee-houses, salons, and Tischgesellschaften. In the salons and their counterparts Habermas discerns institutional criteria that would distinguish the discourse of modernity. For example, the social intercourse of the participants embodied not so much a presupposition of equal status as a total disregard of status. “Les hommes, private gentlemen, or die Privatleute made up the public not just in the sense that power and prestige of public office were held in suspense; economic dependencies also in principle had no influence.” The important point, he contends, is not whether the idea of the public was actually realized in the salons, coffee houses, and Tischgesellschaften, but that it became “institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim.” Another feature of the new discursive activity was the problematization of areas of life formerly not subject to question. At a time when the rational orientation involved in capitalism demanded ever — greater information, it was only a matter of time before interpretation in philosophy, literature, and art would escape the monopoly held by church and court. “To the degree… to which philosophical and literary works and works of art in general were produced for the market and distributed through it, these culture products became similar to that type of information: as commodities they became in principle generally accessible.” However exclusive the actual public, it was always embedded in “a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who—insofar as they were propertied and educated—as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion.” Inclusiveness was also promoted by the emergence of a concert-going public, which developed when admission on the basis of payment turned musical performances into commodities. Music, like literature and philosophy, thereby assumed the form of cultural products freed of ties to a purpose set by court or church. The history of the theater is somewhat more complex, but here too, Habermas maintains, a “public in the strict sense of the word” could come into existence only when the theater declined as an expression of courtly publicity.19
Habermas views the culture of the “town” and the salons as a bridge between the collapsing courtly form of publicity and the new publicity connected with the emerging bourgeois public sphere. The commodification of culture, already a factor in the literary institutions of the urban nobility, was thus further intensified by bourgeois intellectuals who learned the art of rational-critical public debate in their adventures in the “towns.” This bridging thesis presents difficulties, however, because it cannot explain the specificity of bourgeois publicity.
Habermas’s initial attraction to the classical bourgeois public sphere was rooted in an effort to recover its emancipatory potential for critical theory.20 It was his intention to use the emancipatory moment he was hoping to find, to develop a critical standard against which he could evaluate subsequent historical public spheres.21 He also did not want to accede to the liberal view that prevailed after the extension of the franchise to working-class males, briefly, that political agreement is no more than a “strategically conducted struggle” of differences that are basically irreconcilable.22 For these reasons he needed to show that bourgeois publicity involved something more than the rational-critical public debate which was essentially and internally related to the development of capitalism.
To recover the normative force of bourgeois publicity, Habermas stages what appears to be a counter-thesis, namely that the literary institutions of the bourgeois owed their existence to a decisive break with those of the urban nobility. This surprising turn in the argument actually re-directs the analysis—the emphasis is now on rupture rather than continuity and on the arbitrariness of historical forces rather than evolution. What distinguishes Habermas’s synchronic account is the location of institutional changes at the level of the bourgeois household as the principal factor in the development of a bourgeois public. In his words, “the rational-critical public debate of private persons with one another flowed from the well — spring of a specific subjectivity… [that] had its home, literally, in the sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family.”23 To draw together the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of the analysis, we might say that, as the bourgeois were making social and economic advances and as they were learning the art of rational-critical public debate, there also occurred deep structural changes at the level of gender relations. The patriarchal conjugal family became the dominant family type within the bourgeois strata, and its eventual consolidation as the norm led to the displacement of both the open “houses” typical of aristocratic life and the “extended families” of the countryside.
While the bourgeois “public use of reason” is explained with reference to the patriarchal conjugal family, this explanation requires not only a detour to a structural argument, but also a temporary departure from the discourse of public and private. Habermas now distinguishes between the public (in its literary and political forms), the private (economic), and the intimate (conjugal family). The idea of a third sphere makes it possible for him to argue that, while the bourgeois learned the art of rational-critical public debate from the urban nobility, the public sphere that they created—in literary works, but also in philosophy and law—became the expression of a sphere of subjectivity that was specifically bourgeois. To miss that point—as one might be inclined, given that Habermas himself privileges the diachronic aspects of his analysis—is to fail to see the importance of his argument that the bourgeois “public use of reason” was not, in essence, a continuation of the salon-based, rational-critical public debate.24 According to Habermas, bourgeois subjectivity was structurally tied to a concept of “humanity” that originated as a feeling of “human closeness” in the innermost sphere of the conjugal family. That “closeness” was apparently related to the “permanent intimacy” characteristic of the new type of family life (in contrast to the “playful” intimacy of the urban nobility). The historical self-image of the bourgeois family was in serious conflict with its reality: though members of a family might view themselves “as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another,” the wife and children were, in fact, socially and economically dependent on the male head. These asymmetrical relations notwithstanding, “the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the experiences of the conjugal family’s private sphere were surely more than just ideology.” They also constituted an “objective meaning contained as an element in the structure of the actual institution, and without whose subjective validity, society would not have been able to reproduce itself.”25
To demonstrate the emerging consciousness of a common humanity,
Habermas recounts the flood of letter exchanges and diaries of the eighteenth century that Michel Foucault would later situate in the tradition of a “confessional mode.”26 Habermas places these confessing activities in a different (and more positive) light with the suggestion that they were intrinsically “audience-oriented” and “experiments with the subjectivity discovered in the close relationships of the conjugal family.” Taken together, these Habermasian and Foucaultian insights increase our understanding of a complex historical process. However, the significance of Habermas’s point that there is a transfer of experience from the intimate to the public spheres gets lost as he now effaces the intersection of “intimate” and “public.” On the surface, the experiences of the former spilled over into the latter, as author and reader engaged in “intimate mutual relationships” and “talked heart to heart” about what was “human.” He relates that the bourgeois reading public sought insight about itself in the moral weeklies and Richardson’s Pamela, as it would later on in the domestic drama and the psychological novel.27 Foucault was similarly struck by the confusion of identity experienced by privatized individuals set adrift from the cohesiveness of tradition. The bourgeois could not, like the aristocrats they were displacing, simply refer to their superior “blood”: according to Foucault, they constructed a body for themselves by looking “inward.” The rest is “history.” As Habermas reports, the reading public grew as public libraries were founded, book clubs and reading circles were established, and weekly and monthly journals increased their sales. A liberal political public sphere developed out of this liberal literary public sphere as the state-governed apparatus succumbed to the pressure of the newly confident bourgeois to debate publicly the general rules governing commodity exchange and social labor.28
If the bourgeois came to see themselves as authentically human, it follows that they would regard the beliefs they developed about themselves in the “psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political — economic one” as applying in principle to a “common” humanity. In a trivial sense, they could not help but profess that the “voluntariness, community of love, and cultivation” that they believed they had discovered in a process of self-clarification inhered in humankind as such.29 But Habermas is not simply referring to beliefs about a humanity that might be found to be false. The concept of humanity, while historically produced, was itself part of a newly structured “public use of reason.” Whatever the historical circumstances in which it emerged, the bourgeois experience of humanity was an event of world historical importance. For the first time there developed a concept of humanity that was not derivative (based on higher law) and that was in principle inclusive. Habermas notes that even though the public of the constitutional state was historically restricted, through property (and implicitly education) qualifications, it had a “strict” view of the public sphere: “in its deliberations it anticipated in principle that all human beings belong to it.”30 Whereas the publicity of representation typical of the court had been located in the person of the sovereign, the site of the new publicity was the “people.” Early bourgeois writers soon identified this new publicity with openness and the “rule of law,” the very opposite of the secrecy and arbitrariness typical of courtly practices.31
The Contradictory Institutionalization of the Public Sphere Habermas offers the model of the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere as a description of the public sphere’s internal dynamic. I want to demonstrate why he thought that this dynamic logically held out the promise of a self-transformation that, paradoxically, could not help but remain true to the liberal ideal of humanity.
At the heart of the model is an ambivalence in the concept of law. As “an expression of will,” the concept of law “included as an element the claim… to the exercise of domination,” but as an “expression of reason” it retained “other, older elements of its origin in public opinion” and in fact aimed at the dissolution of domination. Cross-cutting this ambivalence between force and freedom is another one between a particular and a general interest, as reflected in the equation of bourgeois and homme— property owner and “human being.” These ambivalences, which structure the model, also de-stabilize it, and this de-stabilization is sufficient to actualize its built-in mechanism for self-transformation—there are potentially ever new definitions of “human beings” and “universal interest.” Therefore, while the historical transformation of the public sphere was initiated by the socialist rejection of the liberal equation of property owners and human beings and by the Marxist identification of new relationships of power between the class of property owners and the class of wage-earners, the rejection of a particular (bourgeois) claim to represent a general interest does not dislocate the internal dynamic of a public sphere committed to the idea of a general interest and to the non-coercive use of reason.
The counter-model does, however, reverse the liberal distinction between public and private. Whereas the liberal model required that private people come together as a public to secure their private sphere legally and politically, the “universal concern” of the mass of non-owners who gained access to the public sphere (through electoral reforms) is no longer the reproduction of social life under the conditions of private appropriation, but rather the reproduction of social life as such. The liberal “public of private persons” is thus transformed into a “public of citizens,” and criticism and control by this new public extend to the formerly privately controlled area of socially necessary labour.
Habermas’s class-based model reflects the historical fact that class conflict had to be built into the argument for the inclusion of non-owners. It does not, however, explain why the raising of the class issue failed to secure women’s participation. That question is a potential challenge for his model, as he concedes in the new (1990) foreward to his book. With reference to Pateman’s work,32 he formulates the problem for contemporary feminism as follows: “The question is whether women were excluded from the bourgeois public sphere in the same fashion as workers, peasants, and the ‘people,’ i. e., men lacking ‘independence.’”33 He also seems to agree that women were in fact excluded in a different way. At least he reports on Pateman’s findings without registering any objection on the substance of what she says:
unlike the institutionalization of class conflict, the transformation of the relationship between the sexes affects not only the economic system but has an impact on the private core area of the conjugal family. This shows that the exclusion of women has been constitutive for the political public sphere not merely in that the latter has been dominated by men as a matter of contingency but also in that its structure and relation to the private sphere has been determined in a gender-specific fashion. Unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men, the exclusion of women had structuring significance.34
He has grasped the import of Pateman’s thesis. However, though he notes her scepticism about the potential of a public sphere that continues to be marked by patriarchy, he also views her critique as premised on unredeemed claims to “rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere’s self-interpretation.”35 That premise of Pateman’s argument, as mentioned above, would situate her within the discourse of modernity. Habermas’s point is that, if women appeal to the norms of that discourse, women’s exclusion from the public sphere cannot be constitutive in the “Foucaultian” sense.
He clarifies what he means by distinguishing between two types of exclusion:
We may use ‘excluded’ in Foucault’s sense when we are dealing with groups that play a constitutive role in the formation of a particular public sphere. ‘Exclusion’ assumes a different and less radical meaning when the same structures of communication simultaneously give rise to the formation of several arenas where, beside the hegemonic bourgeois public sphere, additional subcultural or class-specific public spheres are constituted on the basis of their own and initially not easily reconcilable premises.
The “less radical” type of exclusion is a reference to remarks he made in the 1962 foreword to his book, in anticipation of criticisms that he did not consider alternative publics such as the Jacobins or the Chartists. As for “Foucaultian” or constitutive exclusion, Habermas did “not consider [that type] at all at the time.”36 He now (1990) explains it with reference to Foucault’s idea that “the formative rules of a hegemonic discourse… [are] mechanisms of exclusion constituting their respective ‘other’” and identifies, as a key component of constitutive exclusion, the absence of a “common language” between the participants of the hegemonic discourse and the “protesting others.” In Habermas’s view, the category of constitutive exclusion can be used to understand the events that led to the collapse of traditional societies. In the bourgeois revolutions, he writes, the “people,” having been constituted as the “other” of aristocratic society, had had no choice but to “move and express themselves in a universe that was different and other.” However, he denies the relevance of the category for analyses of modernity by arguing that the liberal public sphere had a built-in potential for self-transformation that made Foucaultian-type discourses structurally impossible.
Bourgeois publicness… is articulated in discourses that provided areas of common ground not only for the labor movement but also for the excluded other, that is, the feminist movement. Contact with these movements in turn transformed these discourses and the structures of the public sphere itself from within. From the very beginning, the universalistic discourses of the bourgeois public sphere were based on self-referential premises… they differ from Foucaultian discourses by virtue of their potential for self-transformation.37
If, as Habermas contends, women’s exclusion cannot be explained with reference to the constitutive (Foucaultian) type, and if, as he admits, it does not fit the model of the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere, and if there is, as he insists, the structural possibility of selftransformation, we need to get a better idea of what is involved.
I shall take Habermas to mean that women’s exclusion was constitutive, though in a way that avoids closure of the Foucaultian type. I propose that we think in terms of two types of constitutive exclusion: one that is logically constitutive (the Foucaultian type) and another that is historically constitutive. This allows us to view Habermas’s position as involving the claim that, while women’s exclusion was historically constitutive of a specific (liberal) public sphere, it was not logically constitutive because it belonged to the nature of the public sphere that emerged in modernity that it had the capacity to “correct” for the limitations of its historically gender-specific institutions. His response to feminists would then have to be interpreted as follows: a capacity for radical reconstitution—sufficiently radical to effect fundamental structural change—is a built-in feature of the public sphere of modernity.
If gender exclusion represents different problems from those pertaining to class, the resolution of those problems would also require a different view of the potential for self-transformation of the public sphere than the one Habermas offered in 1962. One way of looking at the matter is to suggest that because he leaves gender relations unaccounted for, his model cannot tolerate an argument based on gender conflict, just as classical liberal theory, which left class relations unaccounted for, could not allow for an argument based on class conflict. There is some point to this view, but the gender problem is not exactly parallel to the class one because the internal dynamic of the model relies on the category of gender in a complex way.