The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
The concept of the public sphere is used most commonly to refer to the realm of public discourse and debate, a realm in which individuals can discuss issues of common concern. The public sphere is generally contrasted with the private domains of personal relations and of privatized economic activity.
One of the most important accounts of the public sphere was provided by Jürgen Habermas in his classic work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]). Habermas traced the development of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) from Ancient Greece to the present. He argued that, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, a distinctive type of public sphere began to emerge. This ‘bourgeois public sphere’ consisted of private individuals who gathered together in public places, like salons and coffee houses, to discuss the key issues of the day. These discussions were stimulated by the rise of the periodical press, which flourished in England and other parts of Europe in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The bourgeois public sphere was not part of the state but was, on the contrary, a sphere in which the activities of state authorities could be confronted and criticized through reasoned argument and debate.
The development of the bourgeois public sphere had important consequences for the institutional form of modern states. By being called before the forum of the public, Parliament became increasingly open to scrutiny; and the political role of the freedom of speech was formally recognized in the constitutional arrangements of many modern states. But Habermas argued that, as a distinctive type of public domain, the bourgeois public sphere gradually declined in significance. Many salons and coffee houses eventually disappeared, and the periodical press became part of a range of media institutions which were increasingly organized on a commercial basis. The commercialization of the press altered its character: the press gradually ceased to be a forum of reasoned debate and became more and more concerned with the pursuit of profit and the cultivation of images.
Habermas’s argument concerning the transformation of the public sphere has been criticized on historical grounds (Calhoun 1992), and in terms of its relevance to the social and political conditions of the late twentieth century (Thompson 1991).
But the concept of the public sphere remains an important reference point for thinkers who are interested in the development of forms of political organization which are independent of state power. It also remains a vital notion for theorists who are concerned with the impact of communication media in the modern world. The concept emphasizes the importance of open argument and debate—whether conducted in the media or in a shared locale—as a means of forming public opinion and resolving controversial political issues.
John B.Thompson
University of Cambridge
References
Calhoun, C. (ed.) (1992) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA.
Habermas, J. (1989 [1962]) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, UK.
Thompson, J.B. (1991) Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication, Cambridge, UK.
Further reading
Keane, J. (1991) The Media and Democracy, Cambridge, UK.
Landes, J. (1988) Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca, NY.
Sennett, R. (1974) The Fall of Public Man, Cambridge, UK.
See also: media and politics; privacy.
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