Public Sphere

The Public Sphere According to Habermas

Increasingly, discussions about democracy and the media are framed within the concept of the public sphere. In schematic terms, a functioning public sphere is understood as a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates—ideally in an unfettered manner—and also the formation of political will, that is, public opinion. In the vision of the public sphere, these spaces, in which the mass media and now, more recently, the newer interactive media figure prominently, serve to permit the development and expression of political views among citizens. These spaces also facilitate communicative links between citizens and the power holders of society. While in the modern world the institutions of the media are the institutional core of the public sphere, we must recall that it is the face-to-face interaction, the ongoing talk among citizens, where the public sphere comes alive, so to speak, and where we find the actual bedrock of democracy.

While versions of the concept of the public sphere appear in the writings of a number of authors during the 20th century, such as Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt, and John Dewey, most people today associate the concept with Jürgen Habermas's version that was first published in 1962. Though the full text was not translated into English until 1989, his concept had by the 1970s come to play an important role in the critical analysis of the media and democracy in the Englishspeaking world. Since the translation, both the use of the concept and critical interventions in relation to it have grown considerably. While Habermas has not attempted a full-scale reformulation of the public sphere, it is clear that his view of the concept is evolving as his work in other areas develops.

After an extensive historical overview, Habermas surmises that a public sphere began to emerge within the bourgeois classes of Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The institutional basis for this public sphere consisted of an array of milieu and media, such as clubs, salons, coffeehouses, newspapers, books, and pamphlets, all of which in various (though incomplete) ways manifested Enlightenment ideals of the human pursuit of knowledge and freedom. [Page 683]For Habermas, the key here was not only the institutional basis, but also the manner in which communication took place in this burgeoning public sphere. He saw that interaction in this social arena, however imperfectly, embodied the ideals of reason, that is, the Enlightenment goals of rational thinking, argument, and discussion. In his notion of the public as a rational, dialogic process, Habermas's account of communication and democracy bears similarities with that of John Dewey. We can note that Habermas's work from the 1980s on communicative rationality further develops normative perspectives on how political communication should take place in order to enhance intersubjectivity and the democratic character of society.

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