John L. Brooke

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John L. Brooke | On the Edges of the Public Sphere | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 | The History Cooperative

On the Edges of the Public Sphere

WHERE are the boundaries of the public sphere? Reading this collection of articles some might well wonder whether the topic of the public sphere is reaching beyond the margins of the useful, an interpretive supernova reaching a critical moment of overexpansion, deflation, and collapse. There is no cause for alarm. Rather, these articles suggest that if scholars are expanding the known horizons of the universe of the public sphere, they have only the beginnings of an understanding of its internal structure. There are vast stretches of interstellar space to be mapped, new stars and galaxies to be discovered, and edges of an interpretive envelope to be probed and pushed back. There is work to be done.

The study of the public sphere began forty years ago with Jürgen Habermas's propositions about the shape and qualities of a domain of association and conversation mediating between private life and the state. In Habermas's original construction the public sphere was strictly bounded in time, space, and content. In time it had a chronology running from the 1680s with coffeehouses, lodges, and theaters of late Restoration London to sometime in the mid- to late nineteenth century with the rise of corporate power in the marketplace. In social space Habermas's public sphere was confined to a bourgeois stratum of independent property holders. And its privileged content was that of rational deliberation on public affairs, through which a people at large began to gain control over the process of governance. This model frames Habermas's account of the "project of the Enlightenment," in which a discourse principle of equal access to public deliberation emerged as a measure of the legitimacy of modern regimes. It was admittedly ambiguous, positing a tension between a class-specific bourgeois and a gendered universal l'homme. It was also, in the end, a very pessimistic vision, reasserting an early-twentieth-century Gramscian-Frankfurt School skepticism about the possibilities of modern democracy in the age of corporate capitalism. It was only, he argued, in a long eighteenth century that rational communication among men of property effectively mediated between state and society.¹

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