Chapter23

=Chapter 23: The Public Sphere= by Jurgen Habermas

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The Concept
The Pubic Sphere is a realm of social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Everyone is guaranteed access to it. The public sphere comes into being in which private individuals assemble to form a public body.

Citizens behave as a public body when they talk with the guarantee of freedom of assembly and association about matters of general interest. Today newspapers and magazines, radio and television are the mass media of the public sphere. They transmit the message and influence those who receive it.

The political public sphere deals with discussions on the state. The state authority is the executor of the political public sphere, but not a part of it. Public opinion refers to the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally - and in periodic elections, formally as well – practices in comparison with the state. Regulations that demand proceedings be public are also related to public opinion (e.g. open court hearings). The principle of public information has made possible the democratic control of state activities. The Public sphere had not always existed. It grew out of a specific phase of bourgeois society.

History
The Public Sphere was not a separate entity in European society of the high Middle Ages. Period symbols of sovereignty were deemed public (e.g. Princely seals.). The actual status of the title did not belong to the categories of public or private. However, the holder of the title feudal lord represented himself publicly. He presented himself as part of something greater, an embodiment of a “higher power”. In modern times, things have not changed as one may think. The authority of political power today still demands a representation at the highest level by a head of state.

A reformation occurred with the feudal authorities (church, princes and nobility) to which the representative public sphere was first linked. This was due to a long process of polarization. Changes caused by this include:

1. Religion became a private matter while the church continued being as one public and legal body among others. 2. Princely authority changed through separating 3. Military, bureaucracy, and legal institutions became independent from the princely authority. 4. Nobility became the organs of public authority, parliament, and the legal institutions. 5. Those occupied in trades and professions developed into a sphere, which would stand apart from the state as a genuine area of private autonomy.

The liberal model of the public sphere
In the first modern constitutions the catalogues of fundamental rights were a perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere. They guaranteed the society as a sphere of private independence and the restriction of public authority to a few functions. At the same time, daily political newspapers created serious competition for the earlier newssheets, which were mere complications of notices. The editorial staff became a new element in the gathering and publication of news. Newspapers became the intensifier of public discussion but not yet a medium of a consumer culture.

This type of journalism can be observed above all during periods of revolution when newspapers of the smallest political groups and organizations spring up (e.g. Paris in 1789). In transition from the literary journalism of private individuals to the public services of the mass media the public sphere was transformed by the influx of private interests, which received special prominence in the mass media.

The public sphere in the social welfare state mass democracy
The liberal model cannot be applied to actual conditions of an industrialized advanced mass democracy organized in the form of the social welfare state. The diffusion of press and propaganda further evolved the public sphere. The public body lost its social exclusivity, coherence created by bourgeois social institutions, and a relatively high standard of education. Private sphere issues have sprung into the public sphere. The public sphere must now mediate these demands, which become a field for the competition of interests that can assume the form of violent conflict.

The idea of the public sphere is preserved in this social welfare state mass democracy. This idea calls for a rationalization of power through the medium of public discussion among private individuals that threatens to disintegrate with the structural transformation of the public sphere itself.