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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 19
state, and the “public authority” aspects of the state acquired meaning beyond that
provided by the representational public sphere. The sphere that emerges to fill
this void is “public” in the more modern and familiar sense of the term, that is,
synonymous with state-related authority; the existence of this sphere is demonstrated
by the presence of “continuous state activity” exemplified by a permanent
bureaucracy and standing army (Habermas 1989).
Hand in hand with this emergence of continuous state activity was the development
of “continuous trafficking in commodities and news” (Habermas 1989, 18),
the second factor contributing to the emergence of the democratic public sphere.
The techniques of communication, initially letters or newsletters and later commercially
produced newspapers, first developed as a means of distributing information
to a limited audience, namely merchants and state authorities. It was not
until information became commodified – that is, until it became apparent that a fee
could be collected from multiple persons for the same information – and the state
authorities began to realize that instructions and regulations could be delivered
to the people through the press, that a genuine “public” emerged as an audience.
Even so, although official announcements were addressed to “the public,” meaning
all subjects of the Crown, in reality the direct recipients of the printed materials
included only the educated classes. Habermas suggests that the increased reliance
on literate materials (first, written and later printed) gave rise to new stratum of
bourgeois people which occupied a central position within the public. The officials
of the rulers’ administrations were its core. Added to them were doctors, pastors,
officers, professors, and scholars, who were at the top of a hierarchy reaching
down through schoolteachers and scribes to the “people”(Habermas 1989).
The transition to a capitalist economic system and the emergence of regular sources
of public information were not, by themselves, sufficient to stimulate the development
of a democratic public sphere. The institutionalization of places for private
persons to gather for critical discussion and debate, first about literature and
art and later economics and politics, were necessary to complete the emergence.
These places – coffee houses in Great Britain, salons in France, tischgesellschaften
(table societies) in Germany – provided an opportunity for private persons to deliberate
and discuss topics of public importance in a sphere outside that controlled
by public authorities. As such, Habermas locates the idealized public sphere
within the private realm, outside of and separate from the sphere of public authority.
Included in the private realm, he writes, was the “authentic public sphere,
for it was a public sphere constituted by private people (Habermas 1989, 30).