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International Journal of Cultural Policy

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Jürgen Habermas, The structural

transformation of the public sphere:
an inquiry into a category of bourgeois
society
a
Peter Duelund
a
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies , Copenhagen
University , Copenhagen, Denmark
Published online: 22 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Peter Duelund (2010) Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the
public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society , International Journal of Cultural
Policy, 16:1, 26-28, DOI: 10.1080/10286630903038923

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 International Journal of Cultural Policy
Vol. 16, No. 1, February 2010, 26–28

REVIEW ESSAY
Jürgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public
sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society
Peter Duelund*

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen,

Denmark
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International
10.1080/10286630903038923
GCUL_A_404065.sgm
1028-6632
Original
Taylor
102010
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duelund@hum.ku.dk
PeterDuelund
000002010
and
& Article
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(print)/1477-2833
Francis
Journal of Cultural
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Policy

The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of

bourgeois society, by Jürgen Habermas, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989, 305 pp.,
(paperback), ISBN 0-262-58108-6

As a liberal bourgeois society developed in the eighteenth century, so too did a public
cultural scene. Its image of itself was based on reason and rational experience instead
of religious teleology. The enlightenment concept became the framework for reflec-
tion in art and politics. The hotbeds were the French salons, English coffee houses,
German Tischgesellschafte and other independent communicative actions and art
scenes of the day in the European lifeworld, where citizens gathered to listen to music,
talk about literature and discuss politics, affairs of state, etc. The individual became
the pivotal point. The formation of the individual and his/her liberation from church
coercion and predestination were, according to enlightenment philosophy, a precondi-
tion for secular cultural education and the development of a modern society governed
by cultural and political democracy.
As a result, the role of the liberal democracy was to reflect and safeguard this
modern view of culture as a human right. Not that the individual was to be barred from
believing in and practising his/her religion. It was, however, an individual right as a
private citizen and not a compulsory tool of power politics. This was liberalism’s
political message. Religion was not to be the opium of the masses, but a horizon,
which the individual could choose, if he/she accepted that other citizens were able to
choose another religion or totally reject a religious view of life. Voltaire was willing
to fight to the death for his opponents’ right to disagree. It was the modern dream of
freedom and democracy.
Jürgen Habermas is the main figure of the second generation of the Frankfurt
School. Beginning with his doctoral thesis, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, from 1961, we may view Habermas’ entire body of critical thought as
a continuous attempt to provide a historical frame for what is basically a normative
analysis of culture and society.
It is notable, however, that Habermas does not specifically employ his analysis of
modern society to discuss cultural politics. Yet it is both possible and desirable to do
so. Habermas’ approach appears especially well suited for this purpose, since his

*Email: duelund@hum.ku.dk

ISSN 1028-6632 print/ISSN 1477-2833 online

© 2010 Peter Duelund
DOI: 10.1080/10286630903038923
http://www.informaworld.com
 International Journal of Cultural Policy 27

work contains a valuable potential precisely for doing research within cultural
politics.
Habermas’ description of the public domain in The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere amounts to what is both a philosophical and sociological
reconstruction of the early forms of bourgeois self-awareness. In order to define
an approach to both these dimensions that is sensitive to empirical details,
Habermas projects an ideal in Max Weber’s sense, outlining a liberal, democratic
society as the outcome of the fight against absolutist power conducted by enlight-
ened citizens, constituting the specific historical interaction structuring the public
domain.
The precondition for the liberation of art was the advent of the market economy
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and the invention of new forms of mass distribution, for example printing. The best
and most popular artists were now able to sell their own works and creative products
on the free market. As a result, artists began consciously to comment on their profes-
sion, on artistic rules, on art as a specific rationale in modern societies. In short, they
began to stand out as an independent profession. A bourgeois cultural public sphere
emerged.
According to Habermas, it is the activity and private experience of citizens that
constituted and supported the cultural and political element in bourgeois society. His
theory of the public sphere is based on an idea of public reason unhampered by outside
influence and hierarchical governance. The public sphere is a medium for the forma-
tion of opinion, it generates social participation and it promotes parliamentary corpo-
rations designed to translate the results of the ongoing public debate into state politics.
It emerges from Habermas’ theory that the fine arts, the cultural situation in
general as well as specific cultural institutions have a decisive role in modern
bourgeois society. In feudal societies, by contrast, the fine arts and other symbolic
manifestations were included in the so-called representational public domain where
they served to legitimise the absolute power invested in Church and King. But in the
aftermath of the bourgeois revolution, the social perception of art and culture was put
on a different footing, and literature and cultural objects became media for translating
individual experience into public awareness, nourishing an enlightened public,
furthering rational and democratic decisions.
Ideally, it was the experience of the private citizen that laid the foundation for the
public sphere. Modern cultural politics grew out of this development. The social goal
of bourgeois institutions was to secure free and unimpeded production and circulation
the symbolic objects without foreign intervention or submission to vested interests or
other kinds of social pressures. Fundamentally, the bourgeois public domain was a
model based on inclusion, not on exclusion.
Here, as everywhere, reality differs from ideals. Of course, the question of what
has become of the above vision in the period after the bourgeoisie grasped economic
power and became ideological and political rulers is urgent for academic research on
cultural policy.
Habermas’ answer to this question is a pessimistic one. Having launched the
ideal model for bourgeois self-awareness in the first chapters of The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, he denounces what he sees as the bourgeois
deceit in not adhering to its own ideals, that is he joins Adorno and Horkheimar in
their onslaught on the cultural industry.
Habermas’ main criticism is directed against cultural submission to particular
interests, especially in the form of a refeudalization of the public domain in the way
 28 P. Duelund

production and circulations of art and culture have become enslaved by power and
money. The consequence of this dependency is a systematic erosion of disinterested
public rationality and argument, reducing the cultural sphere to a purely commercial
business, transforming the former enlightened citizen to a passive consumer of
cultural commodities.
In other words, Habermas’ discussion of the bourgeois public domain in The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere describes the ultimate failure of a
socially unbiased cultural model of communication, and his analysis ends on a very
pessimistic note.
However, the desire to counter this frustrating development was the basis for the
development of public cultural policies of the western European countries after World
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War II. Today these policies would appear, once again, to have been colonised by
economic and national interests.
This raises the question of what the adjective ‘public’ in fact means in terms of
today’s cultural policies. Is the notion of a public sphere as set up in Habermas’
classical works still a useful concept in academic cultural policy research?