Habermas vs. Hauser: Rethinking the Public Sphere

Introduction: Habermas and the Limits of the Bourgeois Public Sphere

Jürgen Habermas's conception of the public sphere transformed philosophers' understanding of the relationship between the state and private spheres, as well as the historical and political developments of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It nonetheless suffers from certain oversights and omissions. In particular, Gerard Hauser notes that Habermas's conception of the public sphere relies on membership in a particular class, and thus serves to negate its own universalist ambitions in the very process of its formulation. Instead, Hauser proposes an understanding of the public sphere that focuses on the rhetorical nature of the interactions within it — and, more crucially, the existence of a "reticulate" public sphere in which individuals from all different groups and social strata engage through rhetorical interaction.

Habermas's Conception of the Public Sphere and Its Internal Contradictions

The subtitle of Habermas's seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, is "An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society," and this subtitle reveals the central flaw in his conception of the public sphere — a flaw noted by subsequent critics and one that motivates Hauser's reformulation. In short, Habermas simultaneously and contradictorily views the public sphere as ideally representing the space in which private individuals publicly discuss the functioning of the state, thus ensuring the equitable functioning of a liberal democracy, while also treating it as only truly open to the bourgeoisie — thereby rendering it not truly "public" in his own sense of the term.

He describes the public sphere as "a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion," and argues that this forum was the result of specific historical forces (Habermas 25–26). The public sphere arises out of "the dissolution of feudal relations in rational-critical debate," and although Habermas recognizes that "the bourgeois constitutional state, along with the public sphere as the central principle of its organization, was mere ideology," he seems to overlook the fact that his conception of the public sphere as a distinctly bourgeois phenomenon negates his idea of it as genuinely "public" (Habermas 125). Habermas thus views the public sphere as arising necessarily alongside the bourgeoisie and as exclusively composed of members of that class, since only they would have access to the social environments and publications which constituted the locations through which the public sphere was entered.

Hauser's Critique: Class Exclusion and Patriarchal Ideology

The main critique of Habermas's conception of the public sphere is that he limits participation in it to a certain class, thus rendering his theory both incomplete and unnecessarily exclusionary. In his essay "Civil Society and the Principle of the Public Sphere," Hauser begins by noting that the view of "the rational function of citizen action as evaluation and judgment […] has ignited recent debate, with Jürgen Habermas's discussion of the bourgeois public sphere especially serving as a lightning rod" for its "exclusionary political implications that have worked toward the subjugation of women and uninvested minorities" (Hauser 21). Furthermore, because Habermas's theory locates "this domain as existing between the private arenas of the family and the official domain of the state," it has "triggered the objection that it marginalizes issues of the body or the family that have not been historically deliberated in male-dominated arenas of influence and that it essentializes an ideologically freighted concept" (Hauser 21).

These two criticisms are not enough to obviate the importance of Habermas's work, but they do reveal major flaws in his formulation. His initial instinct regarding the purpose of the public sphere appears sound, yet his theory is hobbled by an unawareness of the extent to which it remains entrapped in a patriarchal ideology. While this fact has led "the most radical of these critiques" to "not only [call] the principle of the public sphere into question, but [argue] for dismissing it as a theoretically destructive construct imposing undemocratic consequences," Hauser still sees the public sphere as a useful concept for describing the functioning of democracies — albeit one in need of a more inclusive perspective (Hauser 21).

Conclusion: Toward a More Inclusive Theory of Public Discourse

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas proposes a conception of the public sphere that, while flawed, nonetheless offers a useful starting point for considering how individual opinions are mediated and discussed so that they become part of a public opinion separate from officially sanctioned state authority. Habermas's flaw lies in focusing exclusively on the emergence of the bourgeoisie over the course of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries — not because the bourgeois public sphere he describes is not a genuine phenomenon, but because he takes this phenomenon to represent the totality of the public sphere. This flaw has generated sustained criticism, to the point that the utility and validity of the public sphere as a concept has been repeatedly challenged.

Rather than discard the public sphere as a critical and theoretical concept, Gerard Hauser, in "Civil Society and the Principle of the Public Sphere," argues — like Habermas — that the public sphere emerges from a specific historical development, but unlike Habermas, sees this emergence as occurring across society and not linked to the development of any single class. For Hauser, the public sphere is defined not by the solidarity of one class in opposition to the state or other forms of power, but by the rhetorical interaction between disparate groups and ideologies, all of which contribute to generating a public opinion that is greater than the sum of its parts and that acts on its own accord, separate from the will of any given individual or class. In the end, Hauser's theory is more relevant to modern rhetorical theory and contemporary discussions of democracy, because it offers a far more robust and accurate means of understanding the way in which individuals interact within the public space in order to express a generalized will regarding the state and the proper standards of behavior and discourse within it.

Works Cited

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989.

Hauser, Gerard. "Civil Society and the Principle of the Public Sphere." Philosophy and Rhetoric 31.1 (1998): 19–40. Print.