The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration

Joan B. Landes

After a quarter-century delay, Jurgen Habermas’s Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit appeared finally in English translation in the МГГ Press series “Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought,” edited by Thomas McCarthy. Habermas’s philosophical-historical critique of the concept and function of the public sphere in England, France, and Germany (with some parting glances at the United States) from the Renaissance to the twentieth- century served as a direct inspiration for the German New Left and opened up new lines of scholarship and political debate in Germany and Western Europe. The 1989 translation coincided with a series of events (radical transformations in Eastern Europe, the bloody suppression of the democ­racy movement in China, and the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution) which once again pointed to the pertinence of Habermas’s diag­nosis of civil society for democratic theory and practice. Originally submit­ted to the Philosophical Faculty at Marburg as the author’s Habilitationsschrift, the book deserves to be celebrated as a classic: It has stood the test of time, surviving the fortunes of mercurial literary tastes and changing intellectual seasons; its new translation has widened markedly the author’s circle of readers. Nowadays, one is just as apt to hear “Habermas talk” at humanities or legal studies meetings as among social scientists, philosophers, media critics, or feminist theorists.

In the spirit of dialogue, I approach The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from the interrelated standpoints of critical theory, political

thought, and intellectual history, with a special interest in questions of gender I will review the model of the public sphere that Habermas derives from eigh­teenth-century philosophy and society, as well as his account of the rise of democratic social institutions, “universalistic” cultural practices, and the structures of “bourgeois representation” during the age of Enlightenment and Revolution. I lay particular stress on recent scholarship concerning eigh­teenth-century France. In place of a language-centered model of representa­tion, I will emphasize the multiplicity of representation in human communication. Likewise, I will ask whether Habermas’s normative subject is sufficiently multidimensional, embodied, or gendered to account for the orga­nization of power in different cultural settings. Nonetheless, in my estimation, Habermas’s text sets a high standard for the kind of political communication research that can help to bridge present divisions between literature, political theory, and philosophy, on the one hand, and history, on the other. By isolat­ing the public sphere as a structure within civil society, Habermas established a new field of research on the political, distinguishable from both a narrower definition of the state and from a more broadly conceived “political system.” By focusing on the “structural transformations” of the public sphere, Habermas invited concrete investigations of specific forms of political and cultural life, the benefits of which continue to be realized.1

Ironically, this gifted historical-sociological account was produced by an author whose later works earned him a reputation for rigorous, abstract, “rationalistic” scholarship. In this context, an analogy with the recovery of Marx’s “early writings” may be instructive. Marx had been dead for over half a century when the rediscovery of these writings prompted a fundamen­tal philosophical reappraisal of his science. To be sure, Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit is among Habermas’s most influential and widely translated books into languages other than English. Still, as Thomas McCarthy acknowledges, a more timely translation of Habermas’s book “would likely have facilitated the reception of his thought among Anglo-American scholars by showing how the more abstract and theoretical concerns of his later work arose out of the concrete issues raised in this study.”2 While McCarthy’s observations are to the point, the problematic of Strukturwandel can also be appreciated on its own terms, or at least somewhat independently of the trajectory taken in Habermas’s later writings. The path taken by the inde­pendent European reception of the book leads towards feminist and critical theorists who are reconstructing the original model of the public sphere, and to those scholars who are charting the possibilities for what is variously called the “new historicism” or the “new cultural and intellectual history.” In this regard, we might consider whether Habermas has set forth a program for what might yet become a “new historicism” in political or soci­ological theory.3

Updated: 02.11.2015 — 23:48