The Public Sphere
Charles Walton
What did the c18th public sphere look like?
The Public Sphere
Charles Walton
Immanuel Kant
What is Enlightenment? (1784)
• Private use of reason:
– Officer in a civic post
– Can be limited
• Public use of reason:
– A scholar speaking to the general public
– Motivated by the desire to rationally address
matters, not self-interested
• What is the public?
• What does it have to do with Enlightenment?
• Did it have an impact on radicalism and
revolution in the late 18th century?
What is the public sphere?
Jürgen Habermas
The Structural Transformation of the
Bourgeois Public Sphere (1962)
The public sphere
• a space of rational-critical debate
• where private individuals come together
to form a ‘public’
• where ‘public opinion’ is formed and
expressed, often in critique or
opposition to the state or the ruling
elite.
By the ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all a realm of our social
life in which something approaching public opinion can be
formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the
public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which
private individuals assemble to form a public body. They then
behave neither like business or professional people
transacting private affairs, nor like members of a
constitutional order subject to the legal constraints of a state
bureaucracy. Citizens behave as a public body when they
confer in an unrestricted fashion -- that is, with the guarantee
of assembly and association and the freedom to express and
publish their opinions -- about matters of general interest.
(Habermas ,’The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article’, New
German Critique 3 (1974): 49)
Where did the public sphere come
from?
State/civil society split
• Rise of the state (as distinct from civil society)
• Rise of capitalism (socioeconomic power
develops beyond total grasp of state)
• State + Capitalism = new bourgeois family
– Sentiment, sociability, individuality, education
• These new attributes get projected onto public
domains (print, clubs, theatres, salons)
Medieval Household
Bourgeois household
Greuze, mid-18th century
Bourgeois household
Boucher (mid 18th century)
How historians have engaged with
Habermas’s model
• Did the public emerge within the private
sphere, or did state institutions play a role in
creating it, directly or indirectly?
• Was the public sphere exclusively ‘bourgeois’?
• Was it truly egalitarian? (Gender, class
inequalities may have persisted, despite
egalitarian rhetoric)
How did ‘the public’ develop a
legitimate political voice?
• Robert Darnton: content of public opinion
– Irreverence, historical narratives of regime’s decline
• Roger Chartier: skepticism developed in response to the
proliferation of ideas and opinions
– Individuals learn to discern fact from fiction, honest criticism
from libel and slander. Readers become less reverential about
texts and truth claims: monarchy and church pay the price
• Keith Baker: ‘public opinion’ as a concept is erected into an
authority
– A court of last appeals: the tribunal of public opinion
What are we trying to explain in
identifying a public sphere?
• Emergence of English radicalism and the French
Revolution in the late 18th century
• Grievances before the emergence of public opinion:
expressed through guilds, corporations, caste,
religion… or violence
• Grievances after its emergence: public discussion
oriented towards the common good
– NOTE: the ‘public’ as a horizontal conception of society
• Individuals as commensurate moral equals
• The nation as the outer-limit of the ‘public’…
• subjects recast as citizens
Exclusion and the public sphere
• ‘The early bourgeois public spheres were
composed of narrow segments of the European
population, mainly educated, propertied men,
and they conducted a discourse not only
exclusive of others but prejudicial to the interests
of those excluded.’
• ‘The very emphasis on rational-critical debate
implies an incapacity to deal fairly with “identity
politics” and concerns for difference.’
Craig Calhoun, Introduction, Habermas and the
Public Sphere (Massachussetts: MIT press, 1992)p.3
Where were the ‘publics’?
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Print culture (more next week)
Theatres
Clubs
Drinking publics (coffee houses, pubs)
Salons
Theatre
18th Century English Theatre
• Patronised by the Court
• Heavily censored
– Licensing Act of 1737
– Scripts submitted to Lord Chamberlain
– Even Shakespeare’s scripts were modified
• Types of theatre publics: highbrow, lowbrow
– Commercialisation  rise of spectacles, vaudeville,
musicals
– Official theatres begin adapting by 1760s
French Theatre
• Official institutions for performance
– Held monopolistic privileges over types of performances
• Comédie-française
• Opéra
• Comédie-Italienne; Fairground Theatres
– Itinerant troupes
– Judicial battles: infringed upon Comédie-française’s
monopolistic privileges
– Eventually move to fixed vaudeville houses, mid-18th c
– Privileged theatres need to diversify in order to compete with
the ‘low-brow’ theatres
– ‘Low-brow’ theatres become more moralising: theatre as
education
Spectators into publics
• When itinerant troupes move to standing theatres – regular
spectators begin asserting their authority and demanding diversity
in performances
• Commercialisation – consumers’ voice
– Raucous: Tossing fruit on stage
– Interrupting actors, changing the lines to make comments about
current events
– Strikes, boycotts, cabales…
• Push and pull of authority over playbills
– Spectators become ‘publics’, even ‘the nation’: they press troupes to
perform what they (the spectators) want to see
– Elites try to discipline audiences
• Theatre as a school, education
• Police guards, troops, spies in the theatres
• Benches in the parterre (the ‘pit’): discipline the parterre
Clubs and academies
• English Clubs
– Early attempts: party aligned, led by nobles
• Restoration (1660s)
• Early 18th century
– 1760s… more diverse, generators of opinion
• Clubs, masonic lodges, patriotic societies, trade
associations, mutual-aid organisations
• Served as social and economic networks and cushions
– Illness, unemployment, debts
Freemasons
• Voluntary but secret organisations
– London 1717
– Paris 1725
• Membership
– Initially aristocratic with broader social membership across 18th
century
– Many booksellers and printers belonged (generators of printed
ideas!)
• Theoretically egalitarian
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Women’s lodges in France (lodges of adoption)
‘Brothers’ and ‘sisters’  fraternity
‘commerce’ is valued, on all levels
Somewhat mystical, somewhat Enlightened
English freemasons
• Whig in orientation, pro-court in mid early
18th century
• Spoke of ‘constitutions’; voted
• Sociability: knowledge through civilised
discussion
John Wilkes Affair
• MP in the Pitt-wing of the Whigs
• Opposition to George III’s ministry in 1762-63
• Newspaper: The North Briton
– Criticised the Treaty of Paris (1763) and insinuated
that the king’s favourite, Lord Bute, was sleeping with
the king’s mother: libel
• Of those arrested with Wilkes, many were
freemasons
• Wilkes’ spoke in the name of ‘public opinion’ and
addressed ‘the public’
Utopian aims to reform society
• John Whitmarsh (1765)
– ‘The two grand pillars of the masonic art [are to]
promote civilisation and to adorn human life with
every scientific and moral accomplishment.’
• Appropriation of John Locke (1750s-1770s)
• Republicanism, revolution, rights-based society
Spread to Continent
• Holland, Prussia, Russia, Italy, France
• Often aristocratic but alternative sociability to
older codes of social hierarchy
• Members are ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’
– Idea of fraternity
French Academies
• Absolutism at war with salons
– Richelieu vs. Madame de Rambouillet
– (1635) Founding of the French Academy
• 18th century: spread to provinces
– Elite membership
– Scientific experiments, lectures on morality
– Philosophes rising influence in them
Other sites of public opinion
• Public libraries and reading rooms
– British Museum Library (1753)
– Vienna, Berlin: libraries open to public 9-noon
• Cafés
– Subscribed to newspapers
– Conversation/debate over international affairs
– Heavily policed by spies in Paris
• Salons (?)
Public vs. Community
The latter’s decline?
• Social bonds become more abstract
– Less organised around neighbourhood and parish
– Reading/writing communities
– With the spread of carriages and street-lamps,
people travel further in cities… connect with
people beyond their immediate neighbourhood
– Masonic lodges – members crossed cities to
participate in them
• Social stratification as a result?
Social exclusions
• The public sphere: not necessarily the highroad to
democracy
• Criteria for counting among the public
– Civilised manners, education
– Rationality (or the desire to think rationally)
– Male dominated public (according to Kant, Rousseau)
– Racially inflected (European whites as more capable of
reasoning than others)
18th century: apogee of critical public
sphere?
• Critical thought turns into propaganda after
French Revolution (Habermas’s dark view in
1962)
• Public opinion: heavily policed and
manipulated even during the Enlightenment
(historians’ more recent view)
Policing, anxieties?
• Pierre Bourdieu (French sociologist): ‘public
opinion does not exist’!
– Manufactured? Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing
Consent (1988)
• Yet, continued anxiety, because it may become
a real political force that states can’t control.