The Gender Basis of the Model of the Contradictory Institutionalization of the Public Sphere

As discussed above, Habermas traces the historical roots of the principle of inclusiveness to the bourgeois experience of intimacy. The intimate sphere is also of originary significance for the “public use of reason”: it is the actual site of the “truth” of bourgeois ideology and is crucial to his under­standing of how the public sphere’s internal dynamic generates inclusions out of class-based exclusions. According to Habermas, the privatized indi­viduals of modernity experienced a deep ambivalence in the intimate sphere which was carried over into the public one. The individual was both bour­geois and homme—compelled to identify himself as owner of goods and property, even as he claimed (at least implicitly) to be one human being among others. However, while the intimate sphere yields the “truth” for the public one, the gender relations of the patriarchal conjugal family become invisible in Habermas’s model, as the extraction of that truth becomes a publicly resolvable question, spatially removed from the sphere of intimacy. To talk about exclusion now means to expose the false identification of the (political) public of “property owners” and the (literary) public of “common human beings.”38

The relation between male and female in the patriarchal conjugal family, while connected to the ambivalence between bourgeois and homme, cannot simply be identified with it, as Habermas seems to suggest. In fact, The Structural Transformation shows why feminists should be wary of suggesting that women were regarded as “possessions” of the male head of the household, or his “property.” If that were so, women would have been included in the “public of citizens” model in which participants are no longer property-owners, but “human beings.” Moreover, many readers were women, and they were excluded, notwithstanding the fact that, as readers, they had learned the “public use of reason.” Thus, even after ownership had ceased to be an issue as to the definition of a public person, there persisted a “specific form” of humanity—a male one—that falsely posed as a “common humanity.” But the gendered identity shared by the liberal public and its “socialist” successor cannot explain what it was about the gender relations of modernity that demanded women’s exclu­sion. That exclusion was apparently connected to an experience called private autonomy that positioned bourgeois—and eventually all—males in the public sphere of speech and action and females in the intimate one. The general contours of this split have been documented, but its importance for modernity is only now beginning to be understood.

Habermas’s expressed view is that private autonomy had originally derived from one’s status as a private (economic) person and by virtue of one’s control over the means of production, but that within a public of citi­zens (where one’s public status is not tied to property) it had to be grounded in the public sphere. “Private persons came to be the private persons of a public rather than a public of private persons.” Though he views this devel­opment as a reversal, the guarantee of the excercise of private autonomy— in the liberal model no less than in the socialist counter-model—is secured by one’s participation in a public sphere. Moreover, either private auton­omy means something very different in the counter-model—where it cannot refer to private control over the means of production—or its connection to the private (economic) sphere in the liberal model does not exhaust its meaning. That private autonomy cannot be reduced to the economic is suggested by the presence, in the counter-model, of what Habermas calls a “derivative” private autonomy. As the range of potentially public matters increases, a sphere of “informal and personal interaction of human beings… [is] emancipated… from the constraints of social labor (ever a ‘realm of necessity’) and become really ‘private’.” This “really ‘private’” is the intimate sphere, which was obviously intended to survive the socializa­tion of the means of production.39 In Engels’s words, “the relations between the sexes [would become] a purely private affair, which concerns only the two persons involved.”40 If the removal of the intimate sphere from legal regulations of every kind is the ne plus ultra of this “derivative” private autonomy, the “original” private autonomy was only contingently related to one’s status in the private (economic) sphere.

When Habermas talks about a reversal of public and private in the context of the “public of citizens,” we have to understand the term private in the sense of economic. This reading is consistent with the inten­tions expressed in his book, but it also suggests that the intimate sphere was not substantially affected by the reversal (of public and private) that accompanied the public sphere’s structural transformation. With respect to the liberal public, Habermas states that “the individual’s status as a free human being… [was] grounded in the intimate sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family” and was legally guaranteed through such “basic rights” as “personal freedom” and “inviolability of the home.” The legal securing of the “inviolability” of the home—which was not challenged in the transi­tion to the new model—is a violent act perpetrated on those “human beings” legally confined to it, but this apparent “irrationality” goes beyond the obvious circumstance that the individual was a male head of the house­hold or that the patriarchal conjugal family was already presupposed in the category of humanity, since, as Habermas relates (in passing), “family and property” were the “foundation of private autonomy.”41 If, as he also says, the intimate sphere (patriarchal conjugal family) is at the core of the private (property),42 then the bourgeois family is at the core not only of property, but private autonomy itself. That seems to explain why there is a “derivative” private—or intimate—that is not in itself economic even when citizenship is no longer based on ownership.

Habermas’s description of the bourgeois “public of private persons” bears a strong—but ultimately misleading—resemblance to his depiction of the Greek “public of private persons.” It is an integral part of his argu­ment that, in each case, the public sphere was institutionally both separate from and tied to a private one. According to the Hellenic model, public life, or the sphere of the polls, represented what was common to Greek citizens (adult free males). It was constituted in discussion and associated with the activities of the market place, but extended to responsibilities in courts of law and to the common action of athletic games and war. Women and slaves were confined to the private sphere of the household (oikos), but one should not—without qualification—accept the structural — functional argument that the labour of women and slaves was socially required to provide the necessary leisure, in order to allow the few to engage in public activities. As Habermas points out, “movable wealth and control over labour power” could not substitute for “being the master of a household and of a family,” nor, conversely, could someone be excluded from the polis merely because he was too poor or had no slaves. While the patrimonial slave economy gave citizens freedom from productive labour, their status as citizens was strictly tied to their “private autonomy as masters of households.”43

To some extent, bourgeois intimacy, which had no parallel in the Greek model, can be viewed as a camouflage for male domination. As Habermas reports, the bourgeois public owed its existence to “the background expe­rience of a private sphere that had become interiorized human closeness,” whereas the private status of the Greek master of the oikos, “upon which depended his political status as citizen, rested on domination without any illusion of freedom evoked by human intimacy.”44 However, despite the surface similarity of the institutional arrangements of Hellenic and bour­geois publics, the relatively static relation of public and private in the former case was radically transformed, in the bourgeois period, by the new sphere of intimacy. According to Habermas, the “experience of ‘humanity’ originated… in the humanity of the intimate relationships between human beings who, under the aegis of the [patriarchal conjugal] family, were nothing more than human.”45 For the bourgeois, he claims, “human­ity’s genuine site” was the intimate sphere of the patriarchal conjugal family and not the public sphere itself, as one might be led to believe from a comparison of the Greek model.46 In Habermas’s analysis, the Hellenic dyad of public and private yields to the modern triad of public, private (economic) and intimate.

If the category of gender played a crucial and determining role in the elaboration of his public sphere model, why then did Habermas not theo­rize gender exclusion in 1962? It is not enough to say that the gender issue simply never entered his mind at the time—even if that is literally true— because by 1990 he had thought about the issue and he still held to the “larger outline” of his earlier analysis. Nor is it a straightforward matter of personal insensitivity to women’s issues. In fact, he regards the feminist movement as a hopeful sign of a potential in liberal democracies for signif­icant social and political change. I am also reluctant to reduce the matter to a male interest in preserving the idea of private autonomy. The difficulty can be traced to the tradition of ideology critique, in which Habermas’s book is written.

Ideology critique “finds” the “standards” of reason “already given in bourgeois ideals” and takes them “at their word.”47 If the origin of ideol­ogy is, as Habermas claims, in the “identification of ‘property owner’ with ‘human being as such’ in the role accruing to private people as members of the public in the political sphere of the bourgeois constitutional state,”48 ideology critique, as the other side of ideology, also has its origin in the identification of “property owner” with “human being as such”— notwithstanding the fact that it contests this identification as a false one. As a class-based analysis, ideology critique restricts its concern to the rela­tion between public and private (economic) and cannot go beyond the “specific form” of humanity espoused by the bourgeois reading public. The intimate sphere, despite its importance for Habermas’s explanation of the “public use of reason,” falls away as he takes up anew the discourse of public and private.

Bourgeois subjectivity, with its “formal criteria of generality and abstractness,”49 posed as the exact opposite of the particular and concrete that it associated with aristocratic privilege. This reversal of the aristo­cratic model required an expulsion, from the level of the law, of the concrete and particular, even though it fell to reason to secure what had been expelled.

The bourgeois public’s critical public debate took place in principle without regard to all preexisting social and political rank and in accord with universal rules…. These rules, because universally valid, secured a space for the individuated person; because they were objec­tive, they secured a space for what was most subjective; because they were abstract, for what was most concrete.50

The problem is that, under the conditions of an abstract subjectivity, reason cannot make good its claim to “secure” the particular and concrete, except as absences. This aspect of the logic of public and private was to pose conceptual difficulties for postliberal publics, especially in the context of the advocacy of social rights, which seems to require something stronger than the idea of securing space for the private enjoyment of goods. In the case of the social-sexual arrangements of the bourgeois family, however, the idea of an absence takes on a different meaning altogether.

As the ground of the new public, the intimate sphere was legally secured by the liberal state. However, whereas the public and private (economic) spheres were subject, from the start, to a formal regulation which made it possible, in principle, to identify matters of public concern, the informal (non-legal) regulation of internal family relationships ensured that this sphere was basically resistant to the logic of public and private. The special (non-legal) status of the intimate sphere was also a feature of the new “public of citizens.” As Habermas tells us, Marx and Engels, like their liberal counterparts, “considered a relationship to be actualized as ‘private’ only when it was no longer saddled with any legal regulations.”51 The view that the intimate sphere is basically resistant to the logic of public and private is implicit in the argument of The Structural Transformation. However, this view persists, in somewhat different language, in Habermas’s later (1981) thesis of “internal colonization.”52 The colonization thesis refers to the conditions of advanced capitalism, in which there is a contraction of the “public” sphere in the sense of reduced institutional opportunities for non-ideological participation and indepen­dent discussion, but a corresponding increase in state-administrative activities. As the subsystems of the economy and the state gain in complexity, he explains, they respond to social problems associated with capitalist growth by “penetrating” more and more deeply into the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. This penetration is understood as the formal intrusion of a process of juridification (an increase in positive law) in (once) informally regulated lifeworld structures, notably, but not restricted to, family and school. According to Habermas, the juridifica­tion of family and school creates dysfunctions in these lifeworld structures because they are not “constituted in legal form.” He is not simply refer­ring to the negative effects (in the sense of the creation of new dependen­cies) intrinsically related to the implementation of socially necessary welfare policy, but rather to the pathological effects of a process of juridi­fication in areas of life (family and school) which are, by their nature, non-juridical: “in these spheres of the lifeworld, we find, prior to any juridification, norms and contexts of action that by functional necessity are based on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action.” For Habermas, juridification of the (normally) informally regu­lated spheres of the lifeworld means “legally supplementing a communica­tive context of action through the superimposition of legal norms.” As “communicatively structured” rather than “formally organized” areas of action, family and school “must be able to function independent of legal regulation” because socialization in these areas “exists prior to and condi­tions legal norms.” As he sees it, juridification “should not go beyond the enforcement of principles of the rule of law, beyond the legal institutional­ization of the external constitution of… the family or the school.”53 This account is compelling as an explanation of the (well-documented) dysfunctions that occur in the lifeworld structures of the family (and school) when these “socially integrated contexts” are supplemented by legal-bureaucratic measures designed to respond to system imperatives. But it is also conservative insofar as it works as an argument for resistance to fundamental change at the level of family structures; Habermas merely calls for a de-juridification of the lifeworld with no consideration of the issues of justice which such juridification is meant to address. Nancy Fraser54 has rightly argued that his colonization thesis is “gender-blind” and that we need a “gender-sensitive reading” of the developments he traces. Fraser’s views are important and need to be addressed in detail, but I am not entirely convinced that the problem can be traced to Habermas’s “categorial opposition between system and lifeworld institutions,” if that means that we should abandon the opposition to the point where there is no philosophically interesting distinction between system and lifeworld. Rather than breaking down the opposition, as Fraser does, to show how economic (and implicitly political) categories can be applied to an under­standing of the functioning of the family, I would like to heighten the opposition by making the connection between system (economy and state) and lifeworld (notably, family) more complex. My concern about breaking down the opposition is that, while it can lead to insightful analyses, it also tends to obscure features of sex-gender relations that cannot be viewed in terms of the economic and political. The problem for feminism, as I see it, is to find a way of addressing the gender issue while learning from what Habermas has to say about the freedom-denying consequences of the expansion of juridification into non-juridical areas of life.

Updated: 06.11.2015 — 08:31