Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 and is best known as the author of The Theory of Communicative Action. He was a prominent member of the Frankfurt School, a loose coalition of intellectuals who believed that while Marxism was too inflexible as a critique of capitalism, it nonetheless had much to say about the pitfalls of the modern world. Habermas' first contribution to the thought of the Frankfurt School was The Structural Transformation of The Public Sphere, written in 1962. In it, Habermas describes the development of a public sphere of thought that developed out of the salons and coffee shops of 18th century Europe. Before the weakening of monarchical powers that culminated in the French Revolution, public affairs were decided mostly at the King's Court. As a tugging and pulling developed between the monarchs, the church, and the developing bourgeois businessmen, those bourgeoisies slowly won rights and protections for their newly acquired property. Which, in turn, developed into arguments about free speech and a free press that guaranteed a space for public opinion.
The ascension of the public sphere coincided with the emergence of liberal philosophical thought from thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Kant. For Habermas, the public sphere is a bourgeois public sphere though, because it excludes the poor and the uneducated. It only made sense if you had the money to absorb or to contribute to the sphere in a meaningful way. But even so, throughout the course of the early development of capitalism and classical liberalism, the public sphere and the quality of debate that took place in places like the penny coffee houses of London was notably egalitarian, lively, and rational. The growth in long-distance trading required news about those new places of trade and a need for public relationships between people that had a stake in that growth of trade. The relationships were horizontal between people of roughly the same social status, rather than vertical between nobleman and commoners, or kings and his subjects. So initially, the public sphere was a thriving and positive place.
Habermas believes though that in the 1830s a shift started to take place guided by the industrial revolution and the rise of consumerism. Taking a Hegelian dialectic view, Habermas believes that liberalism sought to save itself from its own contradictions by making way for a welfare states for those that capitalism wasn't looking after. While at the same time, the increasing size of corporations and the development of a mass media meant the demarcation between the public and the private spheres became blurred. The pure and authentic nature of the salons and coffee houses and the independence of local newspapers dissolved. Habermas argues that initially literary journals, moral weeklies, the writings of the men of letters ran unprofitably as hobbyhorses of the money aristocracy. But eventually got swallowed by and became unfeasible because of the growing power of the publishing industry.
In the year of the revolution in Paris, every political or politically-minded man of any worth started a club or journal. In May of 1789, as many as 450 clubs and 200 journals sprung up across Paris. But the emergence of an authoritarian state stifled this explosion of free speech and the growth of advertising coerced editors into curating content by profits and little more. Publishing companies became accountable to the whims of the stock market. Habermas argues that this change had a pernicious effect on the public sphere's ability to accommodate rational debate. And questions of politics and morality came to be guided by economic interests and the indifferent flow of capital.
Classical liberalism became unstable, and government intervention was required for the formation of a welfare state, the regulation of business, and the overseeing of mergers and monopolies. Habermas thinks that this had an effect on recreating those vertical relationships seen under feudalism.
Public debates became dictated by public relations as governments, business, and advertising turned to psychology to influence the public with emotive ad campaigns. Advertising psychology has more to do with the emotive relationship of Lord over the [inaudible] than it should under a democratic thinking society. The public sphere became less horizontal, less of a rational, critical environment for incubating ideas, and became an area more heavily influenced by a hierarchical and bureaucratic system. A good example of this is the way mass media operates in a single vertical direction. There's no interaction between readers and editors. The medium is simply consumed.
But Habermas still has hope for the public sphere and highlights it as a fundamental mechanism of democracy. A sphere that's the basis of democratic debate, equality, and rationality. These vertical relationships, though, and the mass media run counter to the view that an effective democracy should mean that all citizens have the ability to engage in society and express their views.
But have we turned a corner? The internet has arguably changed all this to an extent. One of the biggest questions contemporary Habermasians ask of the internet and politics is whether this new space acts as an effective public sphere, or whether it divides an acts as an echo chamber, therefore stifling effective and rational debate. Habermas himself is doubtful about the potential the internet has for restoring some balance to the public sphere for these same reasons. He has also argued that political discussion and debate online still coalesces around the press and central narratives that are dictated by traditional offline media. Benjamin Barber also argues that features such as interaction speed, user solitariness, and emphasis on images polarizes and limits rational discussion online.
In the book, The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics, the authors argue though that the internet has fewer central nodes, fewer gatekeepers, and fewer agenda setters than traditional public discourse. And so makes the playing field more accessible, more horizontal. And content online is less beholden to advertising than traditional mediums. So, while the internet has its limitations for expanding and re-energizing the public sphere, its real effect has only just started to emerge and is only just being studied. If Habermas' bourgeois public sphere emerged as feudalism turned into capitalism, can we expect a drastic change in our relationship to politics as we turn from the industrial age to the information age?
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