The Public Sphere: Ideology and/or Ideal?

Authors(s): Amy Allen

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 40, No. 6 (December 2012), pp. 822-829
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41703105
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 Political Theory
40(6) 822-829
The Public Sphere: © 20 1 2 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 1 0.1 177/0090591712457664

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©SAGE
Amy Allen1

Reading Habermas 's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS)

fifty years after its initial publication, one can't help but be struck by the
work's blindness to the gendered dimensions of the bourgeois public sphere.
Not only does Habermas ignore the ways in which this sphere was founded
on the exclusion of women, who were confined to the private,1 he does this
while acknowledging other exclusionary aspects of the bourgeois public
sphere - its exclusion of workers and peasants - and while valorizing the
bourgeois family for providing a space of intimacy for the private individuals
who would come together in public to discuss matters of common concern.2
So it isn't just that the young Habermas doesn't take into account the ways in
which the subordination of women is implicated in the formation of the bour-
geois public sphere whose lost promise he hopes to recover, nor is it that he
is wholly blind to its ideological dimensions. Rather, he appears to be selec-
tively blind to gender subordination. For the feminists who engaged with
STPS upon its translation into English - especially those who were veterans
of the disputes between Marxists and feminists in the 1970s over whether
feminism was a bourgeois distraction from the real business of socialist
revolution - this selective blindness must have touched a nerve. To be fair to
Habermas, none of those debates had happened yet when he wrote STPS - in
that sense, the book is, like all books, a product of its time - but there can be
little doubt the reception of his work by American feminist theory was fil-
tered through their lens.

'Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Corresponding Author:
Amy Allen, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, 6035 Thornton Hall, Hanover,
NH 05055

Email: Amy.R.Allen@dartmouth.edu

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Allen 823

Once one decides to read STPS through the lens of feminist theory, how-
ever, the de facto exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere
appears rather obvious. But feminist critics of the work made a stronger
point, namely, that the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere
is not accidental or contingent but rather constitutive of that space. If the
bourgeois public sphere is constitutively exclusionary, then as Nancy Fraser
puts it in her extremely influential feminist critique of STPS , "we can no
longer assume that the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere was
simply an unrealized Utopian ideal; it was also an ideological notion" that
served to rationalize an historically emergent form of class, race, and gender
domination.3
In response to this line of criticism, Habermas not only acknowledges that
the bourgeois public sphere excludes women, perhaps surprisingly, he also
bites the bullet and accepts that this exclusion is a constitutive rather than a
contingent feature of the bourgeois public sphere. Although the exclusion of
women shares some features with the exclusion of workers and peasants,
"unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men," Habermas concedes, "the
exclusion of women had a structuring significance."4 And yet, the feminist
argument for the constitutively exclusionary nature of the bourgeois public
sphere does not, Habermas insists, "dismiss rights to unrestricted inclusion
and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere's self-
interpretation, but rather appeals to them."5 In other words, in claiming the
bourgeois public sphere is founded upon the constitutive exclusion of women,
feminists implicitly appeal to the core ideals of that very public sphere -
inclusion and equal participation. What's more, the universalistic discourses
of the bourgeois public sphere have a potential for self-transformation that
allows the public sphere itself to be transformed through its contact with
social movements such as the feminist movement.6 The bourgeois public
sphere may be ideological, but it is not mere ideology.7
This suggests that the proper response to the feminist critique is not to
reject the ideal of the public sphere altogether, but rather to reformulate the
liberal-bourgeois conception of it that Habermas articulates in STPS and to
develop an alternative, post-bourgeois conception.8 Fraser delineates four
specific assumptions of the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in
order to make the concept serviceable for feminist critical theory. First, the
bourgeois model assumes incorrectly that it is possible for people to bracket
existing status hierarchies and participate as if they were peers in public dis-
cussions of matters of common concern; against this assumption, and in line
with some of Habermas's own reflections at the end of STPS , Fraser insists
that social equality is a necessary condition for political democracy.9 Second,

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824 Political Theory 40(6)

in STPS , Habermas tends to speak as if a single overarching universal public

sphere is necessary for a well-functioning democracy;10 in contrast, Fraser
contends that a multiplicity of counterpublic spheres is preferable, especially
in societies that are riven by pervasive social hierarchies.11 Third, Fraser
questions the assumption that public discourse should be restricted to delib-
eration about matters of common concern; instead, she argues, the questions
of what counts as a matter of common concern and who is able to draw and
defend boundaries between public and private must themselves be open to
discursive debate in public, such that we can't ever draw this line in any final
way.12 Fourth, Fraser questions the assumption that a well-functioning public
sphere depends upon a sharp separation between civil society and state; to the
contrary, we need to make a distinction between weak and strong publics -
the former being the site of opinion and will formation and the latter being the
locus of political decision making - and theorize their interrelation.13
Later, in his monumental work of legal and political theory, Between
Facts and Norms ,14 Habermas reformulates his conception of the public
sphere, taking on board some - but not all - aspects of this revised, post-
bourgeois conception of the public sphere. Specifically, he picks up Fraser's
notion of subaltern counterpublics with his account of "alternative" publics
as sites of critical publicity, he explicitly adopts her distinction between
weak and strong publics, and he strengthens his account of the relationship
between social equality and political democracy with his analysis of the
co-implication of public and private autonomy.15 Indeed, he now takes femi-
nist debates over equality to provide the primary example for the necessity
of securing public and private autonomy together.16 As he puts it: "no [legal]
regulation, however sensitive to context, can adequately concretize the
equal right to an autonomous private life unless it simultaneously strength-
ens the position of women in the political public sphere and thereby aug-
ments participation in forms of political communication that provide the
sole arenas in which citizens can clarify the relevant aspects that define
equal status."17 Hence, Habermas's subsequent developments of public
sphere theory seem to bear out the claim that his account of the public sphere
can be reformulated to serve feminist ends.
However, subsequent historical, political, and theoretical developments in
the intervening two decades have raised new questions about the constitutive
exclusions and ideological distortions at work in even this reformulated ver-
sion of public sphere theory. Under pressure to make sense of current condi-
tions of globalization, feminist theory, political theory, and critical theory
have all undergone a global turn, and this turn has once again thrown the
concept of the public sphere open to debate. This global turn reveals a

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Allen 825

different set of exclusions in Habermas 's public sphere theory. Even in its
reformulated version, presented in Between Facts and Norms , this model
implicitly presupposes what Fraser calls a "Westphalian political imaginary"
in the sense that it tacitly assumes the relevant frame for the public sphere to
be that of "a bounded political community with its own territorial state."18
Precisely this frame can no longer be presupposed in light of current condi-
tions of transnational publicity. In other words, under current conditions of
globalization, the public sphere has undergone - and is still undergoing - a
new structural transformation.19
In his recent work in political theory, in particular in his theoretical and
political reflections on the European Union and on the prospects for the con-
stitutionalization of international law, Habermas has reflected on this trans-
formation. With respect to Europe, drawing on his argument about the role of
the public sphere in securing democratic legitimacy in Between Facts and
Norms , Habermas argues that the administrative and political power of the
EU can have democratic legitimacy only to the extent that it is rooted in a -
not yet existing - European public sphere.20 Against Euro-skeptics, Habermas
argues that European political integration need not be based on a pre-existing
European identity; rather, the requisite forms of European political identity
and civic solidarity could be generated in a suitably configured transnational
European public sphere.21
With respect to the global public sphere, Habermas worries that the emerg-
ing communicative structures of informal global public spheres cannot be
efficacious so long as there are no constitutionally institutionalized mecha-
nisms for translating the public will generated in such spheres into binding
political power. The global protests against the start of the Iraq war in 2003
provided a poignant example of this efficacy deficit. Nevertheless Habermas
is cautiously optimistic that the opinions and wills generated in such global
public spheres could be efficacious if directed at a global institution - a dra-
matically reformed UN - that would be charged with the limited goals of
preventing violence and protecting human rights and empowered with the
political muscle to achieve those goals. To be democratically legitimate, such
a global institution would have to be rooted in a global public sphere, but
such a sphere need not be held together by thick forms of political identity or
civic solidarity; rather, "shared moral outrage over gross violations of human
rights provides a sufficient basis for solidarity among world citizens" anďthe
achievement of such a thin form of global solidarity is not, in Habermas 's
view, an "insuperable hurdle."22
To be sure, one might be much more skeptical than Habermas is about the
current prospects for developing either European civic solidarity - especially

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826

in light of the ongoing financial crisis in Europe - or a global agreement on

what constitute human rights violations or unjustified uses of violence in
international relations.23 However, even setting these difficult issues aside,
important questions can be raised about the normative legitimacy of these
emerging transnational and global publics.24 Consider that participants in
transnational and global public spheres are not fellow citizens who enjoy
equal political status, even in a formal sense, and that the structure of trans-
national and global public spheres favors elites who have the material and
symbolic resources needed for global communication,25 and who possess the
requisite linguistic skills, including the ability to communicate in English.26
In light of massive global inequalities, we have to wonder whether the opin-
ions and wills debated and formed in emerging transnational and global pub-
lic spheres could possibly be legitimate, in the sense of inclusive of all
affected and allowing for genuine parity of participation.27 One might even
wonder about whether public sphere theory itself is too bound to its European
Enlightenment context - and thus too entangled with the legacies of colonial-
ism and imperialism - ever to be fully attentive to these power dynamics.
This latter question has emerged in an interesting way in response to
Fraser's transnational, post-Westphalian reconstruction of the Habermasian
notion of the public sphere.28 Fraser's critics point out the extent to which her
strategy of grounding the normativity of her conception of the public sphere
historically - rather than in an ideal theory - renders her account particularly
vulnerable to such worries. Given this broadly speaking Hegelian normative
strategy, which Fraser shares with Habermas, the particular version of history
one tells matters a great deal. As Hutchings puts this point with respect to
Fraser (though it is equally, if not more, true of Habermas): this "is a future-
oriented vision, informed by a range of assumptions about where we have
come from and where we are going (and therefore who's in front and who's
behind). This is a story that reflects the specific political imaginary that is
closely tied up with the experience of Western modernity in general, and the
fate of liberal-capitalist welfare states in the latter part of the 20th century in
particular."29 In other words, it isn't enough for public sphere theory to be
recast in a broader, transnational, post-Westphalian frame, as important and
pressing as this project is; we also need to interrogate the implicit assump-
tions and ideological distortions - about history, modernity, progress, enlight-
enment, and ultimately about the relationship between United States, Europe,
and the rest of the world - that inform its normative underpinnings.30
However, even if we assume, with Fraser's critics, that the post-bourgeois,
post-Westphalian conception of the transnational and global public sphere is
ideological, this still leaves us with a version of the question that Habermas

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Allen 827

first posed fifty years ago in STPS : is it merely ideology? In other words, can
the concept of the public sphere be reconstructed in a way that makes it ser-
viceable for a critical theory that has adopted not just a transnational and
post-Westphalian but also a postcolonial perspective? I cannot answer this
question here. But in closing I would just like to note that answering this
question will require critically interrogating the modernist theory of history
that underpins the normativity of Habermasian critical theory.31 In confront-
ing this question, we will also have to be careful not to presuppose that we
know how inclusion and equality in the context of neocolonial and neoimpe-
rial power relations is possible, that we know what form it will take and what
rules or procedures will structure it, for doing so threatens to obscure rather
than to illuminate the ideological nature and functions of our current concep-
tion of the public sphere.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.

Notes

1 . On this point, see the contributions by Joan Landes and Mary Ryan in Habermas
and the Public Sphere , ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
2. On the exclusion of workers and peasants, see Habermas, Structural Transfor-
mation. , 84-88 and 124-25; on the role of the family in the formation of the
bourgeois public sphere, see pp. 43-5 1 .
3. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflec-
tions on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1996), 76.
4. Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermas and
the Public Sphere , 428.
5. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," 429.
6. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," 429.
7. Habermas had already acknowledged as much in STPS , though without noting
the gendered aspects of this ideology; see Habermas, Structural Transformation ,
88, 160, 235.
8. See Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 76.

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828 Political Theory 40(6)

9. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 77-80. One could argue that this is
one of the main points of Habermas' s argument in the closing section of STPS,
in which he raises doubts about whether genuinely inclusive discourse can be
achieved without social equality - for workers - and discusses the prospects for
a post-bourgeois public sphere. Fraser's point, I take it, is that, in his historical
reconstruction, Habermas does not adequately problematize this assumption of
the bourgeois conception of the public sphere, particularly as it relates to the
exclusion of women.

10. Habermas does briefly discuss the role of "intraorganizational public spheres" -
by which he means political parties and special-interest groups - in creating
possibilities for "critical publicity." See STPS , 244-50. At this point, he seems
quite pessimistic about the prospects such public spheres have for combatting
the leveling effects of the mass opinions generated by the culture industry. Of
course, this situation would have appeared quite different by the time that Fra-
ser's critique was written, given the emergence in the meantime of the new social
movements such as second-wave feminism, which, rather than political parties,
serve as the model for Fraser's subaltern counterpublics.
1 1 . Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 80-85.
12. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 85-89. For related discussion, see also
Fraser, "Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of
Clarence Thomas," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus ; and Seyla Benhabib, "Models
of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,"
in Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100.
13. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 89-92.
14. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse The-
ory of Law and Democracy , trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
15. On "alternative" publics, see Habermas, Between Facts and Norms , 373-74; on
informal (weak) versus institutional (strong) publics, see pp. 306-8; on the rela-
tionship between equality and democracy, see pp. 420-23.
16. See Between Facts and Norms , 419-26, and Habermas, "On the Internal Rela-
tion between the Rule of Law and Democracy," in Habermas, The Inclusion of
the Other: Studies in Political Theory , ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
17. Between Facts and Norms , 426.
18. Nancy Fraser, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and
Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World," Theory, Culture, and
Society 24, no. 4 (2007): 7-30, p. 8.
19. Ibid., 15.

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Allen

20. Habermas, "Does Europe Need a Constitution?" in Time of Transitions , ed. and
trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 102-6.
21. Habermas, "Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary, and Is
It Possible?" in Habermas, The Divided West , ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). On this point, see also Habermas, "The
Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," in Habermas, The
Postnational Constellation : Political Essays , ed. and trans. Max Pensky
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 98-103.
22. Habermas, "Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary," 80. See also
Habermas, "Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a
Chance?" in Habermas, The Divided West , 142-43.
23. On the latter point, see William Scheuerman, "Global Governance without
Global Government? Habermas on Postnational Democracy," Political Theory
36, no. 1 (2008): 133-51.
24. Fraser distinguishes between the efficacy and legitimacy critiques of the public
sphere; I am mostly concerned here with the latter. See Fraser, "Transnationaliz-
ing the Public Sphere," and "Öffentlichkeit," in Habermas-Handbuch , ed. Hauke
Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont (Stuttgart: JB Metzler Verlag,
2009).
25. Fraser, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere," 16.
26. Ibid., 18.
27. Ibid., 19.
28. See the following responses to Fraser's essay, "Transnationalizing the Public
Sphere," in the same issue of Theory ; Culture and Society : Kimberly Hutchings,
"Whose History? Whose Justice?" 59-63; Shalini Randeria, "De-politicization
of Democracy and Judicialization of Politics, "3 8-44; Armando Salvatore, "The
Exit from a Westphalian Framing of Political Space and the Emergence of a
Transnational Islamic Public," 45-52; and Oscar Ugarteche, "Transnationalizing
the Public Sphere: A Critique of Fraser," 65-69.
29. Hutchings, "Whose History?" 62.
30. For an important discussion of the relationship between the normative proj-
ect of Habermasian critical theory, with its emphasis on ideas of progress and
human development, and the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and racism,
see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
31. On this point, see also Hutchings, "Whose History?"

About the Author

Amy Allen is Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and

Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College.

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