Habermas and Hauser on the public sphere

Jurgen Habermas' conception of the public sphere transformed philosopher's 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, but it nonetheless suffers from certain oversights and omissions. In particular, Gerard Hauser notes that Habermas' conception of the public sphere relies on membership in a particular class, and thus serves to negate its existence in the 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 even more crucially, the existence of a "reticulate" public sphere in which individuals from all different groups and social strata engage through rhetorical interaction.

The subtitle of Habermas' 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 Habermas' conception of the public sphere which has been noted by subsequent critics and motivates Hauser's reformulation of the public sphere with an eye towards its rhetorical nature. In short, Habermas simultaneously and contradictorally 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, but also only truly open to the bourgeoisie, thus 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 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 the public sphere as being actually "public" (Habermas 125). Thus, Habermas views the public sphere as arising necessarily alongside the bourgeoisie, as well as exclusively composed of members of said bourgeoisie, as only they would have access to the social environments and publications which constituted the location in which the public sphere was entered.

The main critique of Habermas' 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 Jurgen 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' theory of the public sphere 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' work, but they do demonstrate rather major flaws in his formulation of the public sphere, so while his initial instinct regarding the purpose of the public sphere seems to be accurate, his theory is nonetheless hobbled by his own unawareness regarding the extent to which it is 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 a concept in need of a more useful perspective (Hauser 21). Hauser argues, like Habermas, "that the public sphere is not merely conceptual but has a specific historical referent," but whereas Habermas seems to view the public sphere as emergent alongside the bourgeoisie, Hauser sees its it as "linked to the Enlightenment's emerging condition and theory of civil society" (Hauser 21). Thus, while Hauser agrees with Habermas in placing the emergence of the public sphere alongside a specific historical development, he differs in what that development was. Habermas argues that the public sphere emerges alongside the transition away from a feudal power structure, but Hauser sees the public sphere as "reflect[ing] a historical development that arose when civil society replaced civic virtue as the dominant model for social organization" (Hauser 22). This transition is what resulted in the emergence of the public sphere, because the whereas "one's reputation as a person who exemplified civic virtue was accomplished by actions that served the country, or by activities that were entirely public in the sphere of political activity," civic society constituted a form of generating accepted political opinions in a space somewhere between that of the individual and the actual process of arguing legislation (Hauser 23-24).

For Hauser, "the political basis of civil society, more important than laissez faire for this discussion, lies in the concomitant rise of an autonomous public integrated with the state through expressions of its own opinion" (Hauser 27). This differs vastly from the paradigm of civic virtue, in which any public expressions were not only integrated with the state, but were an explicit part of and in service to the state. Thus, "the dimension of common recognition that emerged from the conversations within civil society gave public opinion a strong sense," and most crucially, "introduced the radical idea of such opinion formed outside the channels and public spaces of the political structure, such as parliament or court" (Hauser 27). It is worth noting that in his description of the emergence of civil society, Hauser does not limit its emergence to any particular class or social strata, but rather discusses it as a society-wide phenomena which emerged as global societies underwent massive changes. This detail places his theory in stark contrast to that of Habermas, who focuses solely "on a specific domain, the bourgeois public sphere, in which the rising middle class sought to locate and secure its interests" (Hauser 31).

While Hauser states that Habermas' original conception is "without question of monumental insight and theoretical importance," it is nonetheless limited, because "in the context of civil society […] the principle of the public sphere is not confined to a single domain of social coordination," but rather represents the location of "society as self-regulated by the rhetoricity of its network of associations engaged in an ongoing conversation," and thus "composed of multiple discursive arenas each with its own defining characteristics, including respective publics that emerge in them and whose opinions, however ephemeral, they express" (Hauser 31). Thus, the key element of civil society is difference, such that Hauser defines it as "a network of associations independent of the state whose members, through social interactions that balance conflict and consensus, seek to regulate themselves in way consistent with a valuation of difference" (Hauser 26). For Hauser, then, Habermas' biggest flaw is not necessarily that he focused exclusively on the bourgeois public sphere, but rather that he took the bourgeois public sphere to be the beginning and end of the public sphere in general. In Hauser's view, the bourgeois public sphere discussed by Habermas is valid and observable, but only if one views it in the context of any number of other rhetorical arenas in which those citizens who are not members of the bourgeois discuss their interests and their relationship to the state.

This is why Hauser may be said to be proposing a kind of "rhetorical public sphere," because the defining element of it is not class, but rather the rhetorical nature of the interactive space through which individuals with different goals and ideas formulate a general, public opinion. The importance of the public sphere lies not in its existence as the space in which similar and aligned groups come together to determine their shared interests, but rather as the space in which "society's disparate segments" expressed their will "in the form of public opinion," with public opinion being something much "more than the sum of individual opinions" (Hauser 27, 31). Thus, the public sphere for Hauser is defined precisely by its existence as a site of rhetorical interaction, so that the theoretical concept of the public sphere (born out of a specific historical process) becomes relevant not only to the analysis of democracy, but an analysis of the shifting role of rhetoric within democracies. This makes Hauser's theory ultimately more relevant to modern rhetorical theory, because it takes Habermas' initial, flawed observation and places it within a broader, far more accurate context. Hauser transforms the public sphere from a limited tool for describing the functioning of bourgeois power into a widely applicable tool for understanding how disparate groups deploy rhetoric in order to have their individual opinions ultimately represented in the much larger public opinion. This is not to suggest that Habermas' theory is irrelevant for the study of rhetoric, but rather that one must regard it as describing only one small portion of the much larger public sphere which actually contains nearly all forms of non-state, public discourse.