Marie Fleming
Jiirgen Habermas’s first major work was a study of the historical emergence of the European liberal public sphere at the end of the eighteenth century and its subsequent transformation under the pressure of working — class politics.1 Though published as long ago as 1962, the book remained virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic until its recent (1989) appearance in English under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.2 Reacting to the critical attention3 that has accompanied the English edition of his book, Habermas recently said that, on an empirical level, he has “learned most from the criticisms that point to the exclusionary mechanisms of the public sphere, liberal or postliberal.”4 Such criticisms are also, potentially, fundamental challenges to his 1962 finding that inclusivesness was the public sphere’s crucial justificatory claim. At the very least, the theorization of exclusion which is taking place in several academic disciplines suggests that the public sphere of modernity, in its liberal (bourgeois) and subsequent forms, might be thought of as structured by a logic of inclusion and exclusion.
Even on Habermas’s account, the bourgeois public had to survive the challenges of a “plebeian” public that functioned for a time during the French Revolution and that persisted in some form in the Chartist and anarchist movements of the nineteenth century.5 He has recently been charged with having unjustifiably “idealized” the liberal public sphere by
overvaluing its principle of inclusiveness and by paying insufficient attention to the exclusionary mechanisms that were operative from the moment of its historical constitution.6 From that perspective Habermas’s argument directs attention to the powerful dynamic of a literate public and reinscribes, at the level of analysis, the historical repression of the illiterate (uneducated) publics which also claimed to represent the “people.” In the new (and lengthy) foreword to the 1990 edition of his book (which was released in Germany with the original text intact),7 he agrees that, in 1962, he underestimated the plebeian public sphere’s significance by thinking of it as “merely a variant” of the bourgeois one. However, he maintains that the class- and culture-specific groups which challenged bourgeois hegemony already shared the communication structures that came to distinguish the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though he would now produce a more nuanced picture, he continues to hold to the “larger outline of the process of transformation” that he developed in 1962.8
Habermas’s analysis is similarly put to the test on the question of gender exclusion. In the years since the first publication of his book, feminist writers9 have raised troubling questions about the consequences for democratic theory of the historical confinement of women to the domestic space of the private sphere. Joan Landes, whose study of France was conceptually indebted to Habermas’s book, argues that the potential for a more gender-balanced public, embodied in the women-friendly salons of the eighteenth century, was lost with the institutionalization of bourgeois norms at the time of the French Revolution.10 Carole Pateman’s recent work can be read as an implicit attack on the premises of Habermas’s account. She argues that the bourgeois idea of a social contract, which was designed to secure civil rights for men, has historically and logically presupposed a sexual contract, which secures men’s sex-right or political right to women’s bodies.11
In 1990, in response to questions about the gender dimensions of the bourgeois public sphere,12 Habermas concedes that “the exclusion of women from this world dominated by men now looks different than it appeared to me [in 1962].”13 However, he undermines the basis for Pateman’s scepticism about modernity’s potential by suggesting that her critique still appeals to “rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere’s self-interpretation.”14 The argument implicit in this remark is that Pateman too is a participant in the discourse of modernity, and in a performative sense, she acknowledges its legitimacy.
Habermas’s argumentative strategy raises further questions, however. We still need to account for the exclusionary practices that barred women from the public sphere, and we also need to theorize the changes that are required to meet women’s claims to “rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality.” The model he developed some thirty years ago to explain the internal dynamic of the public sphere cannot simply be extended to meet newer feminist critiques: “if one seriously tries to make room for the feminist dynamic of the excluded other,” he writes, “… the model… is conceived too rigidly.” If his (1962) model is too rigid to account for gender, then the question of how it could be improved is somewhat of a mystery. “The tensions that come to the fore in the liberal public sphere must be depicted more clearly as potentials for a self-transformation.” He defuses the issue by identifying gender exclusion, along with plebeian exclusion, as “aspects… whose significance [he had] underestimated.” He also insists that “a mistake in the assessment of the significance of certain aspects does not falsify the larger outline of the process of transformation” that he presented in 1962.15 In the last analysis he stands by that work and admits that the social theory which he has been elaborating over the last three decades has changed “less in its fundamentals than in its degree of complexity.”16
Habermas has seriously underestimated the challenge of contemporary feminism, and he is mistaken in thinking that he can simply stand by the “larger outline” of his earlier analysis. In this essay I shall argue that his model of the internal dynamic of the public sphere not only is unable to point the way to gender freedom, but that it actually presupposes gender exclusion.
I shall dissociate the question of women’s exclusion from that of the repression of the historically competing publics. I also want to distinguish my concerns from those of Landes. My focus is upon the gender dimensions of the newly emerging liberal public, and for my present purposes I classify the “pre-literate” salon-based publics along with the “illiterate” ones as explicitly in conflict with the bourgeois model.17 More to the point for my analysis are the attempts, documented by Landes and others, of those women who actually sought—but were denied—inclusion into the bourgeois public that survived its competitors’ challenges.18 My general question is why women who did not challenge bourgeois ideals were denied the right to full and equal participation in the “public use of reason” that, according to Habermas, structured the liberal public sphere. By raising that question I hope to make explicit those aspects of the operation of the “public use of reason” that might otherwise remain obscure in the notion of alternative publics.
The first section of my essay is a critical examination of Habermas’s discussion of the genesis of the “public use of reason.” The second is a review of the model of the contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere that he developed in his book to explain why the liberal public sphere’s internal dynamic could accommodate class-based challenges. In the third section, I show how that model is constituted by the category of gender, even though it rests formally upon the category of class. I conclude by suggesting the implications of my analysis for an understanding of the gender relations of modernity.