Habermas and Arendt on the Public Sphere
Habermas on the Public Sphere
In one of his earliest writings, Habermas defines the concept of “public opinion” in relation to the “public sphere.” By “public sphere,” he means an area of our social life in which public opinion can be formed. Entry is open to all citizens. Citizens behave as a public when they gather freely, without pressure, and with the guarantee of being able to express and freely publish their opinions about opportunities for acting in the general interest. For a large audience, this communication requires specific media: newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Emphasis is placed on the constitutive character of dialogue among all audiences in forming “the public” and generating opinion on diverse issues where people may have common interests. We speak of the political public sphere, differentiating it from the literary, when public discussions concern matters related to the practice of the state. The power of the state is a contracting party of the political public sphere, but not part of it. It is subject to “public” rules, but first and foremost, it requires the attribute of publicity for its task: the public care for the general good of all subjects of law. Precisely when the exercise of political power is effectively subordinated to democratic public demand, institutional influence in government is achieved within the political public sphere through the legislative body.
The concept of the “public sphere” relates to the tasks of criticism and control that the public of citizens informally exercises against the organized domain of the state.
The Position of Hannah Arendt
Examining the agreements and discrepancies between Habermas and Arendt helps us deepen our understanding of the intimate relationship between the conception of public opinion and political dynamics. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas discusses ideas that Arendt vigorously presented in Chapter II of The Human Condition, dedicated to “The Public and the Private Realm.” Arendt places special emphasis on the radical change modernity represents compared to previous eras, particularly in how the private, public, political, and social realms are conceived.
In the modern era, political rights become universal, and the social perspective penetrates all areas of life. A new concept of privacy emerges, restricted to intimacy, which is opposed not only to the public realm but also to the social sphere.
Arendt’s key ideas include:
- Modernity leads to the extinction of the public and private spheres, in their traditional delimitations, subsuming them into the social sphere.
- This social sphere emerges from a double movement: “the transformation of private interests by private property into a public interest” and the conversion of the public into a function of wealth creation processes, becoming “the only common interest that remains.”
- However, this common interest does not create shared spaces of vital significance; rather, it serves merely to increase capital accumulation. “What makes mass society so difficult to tolerate is not the number of people, or at least not fundamentally, but the fact that the world has lost its power to group them, relate them, and separate them.”