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Two Cheers for the "Public Sphere" ... and One for Historians' Skepticism
David Waldstreicher
| HISTORIANS treat theory the way rattlesnakes approach small mammals. They either strike to kill or swallow whole. The latter often amounts to death by citation.1 |
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Judging from the halting quality of the debate over the early American public sphere, amid what appears to be an increasing number of citations to Habermas, it might seem as if the theory (or is it a description? a model?) of the public sphere is half swallowed and half dead. A few sustained engagements aside, the public sphere serves historians mainly as a shorthand for the early Republic's expanding press and popular political culture or for the public as opposed to the private or domestic realm. This vague descriptive usage is quite different from Habermas's argument about institutions and their crucial alteration—their democratization and their decline in critical capacity—between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. |
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Why have historians swallowed Habermas's definition and strangled his argument about change? One reason is that Habermas's account of transformation is a close cousin of modernization theory, albeit with an emphasis on forms of rational discourse. The emphasis on discourse itself, rational or not, made the concept seem like something quite new and perhaps threatening after the linguistic turn. Most historians have been content to leave such questions about institutions, democracy, and culture to sociologists of communication and political scientists who have been writing the most expansive accounts of modernization, democratization, and public life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. That they have drawn on historians' monographs to do so is either interdisciplinary progress or a lost opportunity in historical writing. When historians talk about the usefulness of the public sphere as a theory, why do they so often conflate their disdain for discourse with their discomfort with historical sociology or political science? Neglected in this resistance to theory is that some theorists, like some sociologists and political scientists, are doing, or relying on, broad narratives of historical change, of a sort that historians used to produce and embrace, or at least debate.2 |
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Indeed, fifteen years after Habermas was first introduced to Americanists, the invocation of the public sphere concept by historians has about as much relation to the original historical narrative of modernization offered by its foremost theorist as the concept of the nation as an imagined community has to Benedict R. O'G. Anderson's more challenging (yet utterly neglected) sketch of how secularization and New World creole nationalisms set the stage for Old World inventions of the volk and later anticolonial appropriations of the same.3 Habermas does not yet rival Anderson as the Clifford Geertz of this scholarly epoch (circa 1990–present): he has not quite yet had the dubious privilege of being denuded of all actual historical content. It is notable that historians seem to treat these theorists they can swallow the same way, regardless of whether they have made sound historical arguments. The problem here is not theory (with its usual connotation of philosophy or normative judgment) but rather ambition—and fear thereof. Historians prefer the theorists' definitions to their historical narratives because few want to feel responsible for two or three centuries of nationalism, the public sphere, or anything else so daunting and abstract. (Nor do historians want to come up with generalizing definitions of such complex phenomena: that is what theorists are for.) When historians object to theory, in other words, they are often not objecting to theory. They object to grand historical narratives put forth without fear, without research, and without their professional approval. |
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