JURGEN HABERMAS - THEORY OF PUBLIC SPHERE

Submitted To:

DR. AYAN HAZRA, (Faculty, Sociology)

Submitted by:

Name: ADITI SINGH SEMESTER- I I

B.A.LL.B. (Hons.)

ROLL NUMBER: 13, SECTION: A

Hidayatullah National Law University,

Post Uparwara, Abhanpur, Atal Nagar – 493661 (Chattisgarh)

SUBMITTED ON 5TH MARCH, 2020

 DECLARATION

I, Aditi Singh ,hereby declare that, this project entitled, ‘JURGEN HABERMAS - THEORY
OF PUBLIC SPHERE’ submitted to Hidayatullah National Law University (Raipur), is record
of an original work done by me under the guidance of DR.AYAN HAZRA, Faculty Member,
HNLU, Raipur. Further, where others ideas or words have been included, I have adequately cited
and referenced the original sources.

Aditi Singh

Semester 2 Section A

Roll No. 13

B.A. L.L.B. (HONS.)

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my deepest regard and gratitude for our faculty of Sociology, for putting his trust in me
and giving me a project topic such as this and for having the faith in me to present my report in
the best possible way. I would also like to thank him for the guidance he provided during the
tenure of my working in this project. His consistent supervision, constant inspiration and
invaluable guidance have been immense help in understanding, analyzing and executing this
project.

I would like to thank my family and friends without whose support and encouragement, this
project would not have been possible.

I take this opportunity to also thank the Vice Chancellor for providing facilities like the extensive
database resources in the library and the IT lab for accessing online sources.

Aditi Singh,

Semester 2,

Roll no. 13,

B.A. L.L.B.(HONS.)

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

S. No. CONTENTS PAGE NO.

1 EARLY LIFE OF JURGEN HABERMAS 1

2 INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC SPHERE 2

3 OBJECTIVES 6

4 RESEARCH DESIGN 7

5 RESEARCH QUESTIONS 7

6 HABERMAS’S CONCEPTUALIZATION OF 8
PUBLIC SPHERE
7 THE STRUCTURAL 10
TRANSFORMATION OF PUBLIC
SPHERE

8 DEMOCRACY AND THE PUBLIC SPHRE 12

9 INCLUSION OF RELIGION IN THE 15

PUBLIC PHERE
10 GLOBALIZATION, NEW 17
TECHNOLOGIES AND NEW PUBLIC
SPHERE
11 MAJOR FINDINGS 19

12 CONCLUSION 21

13 REFERENCES 22

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 EARLY LIFE OF Jürgen Habermas
Early life - Jürgen Habermas was born on June 18, 1929, hewas born in
Dusseldorf, Germany and grew up in the postwar era. He was in his early teens during World
War II and was profoundly affected by the war. He had served in the Hitler Youth and had been
sent to defend the western front during the final months of the war. Following the Nuremberg
Trials, Habermas had a political awakening in which he realized the depth of Germany’s moral
and political failure. This realization had a lasting impact on his philosophy in which he was
strongly against such politically criminal behavior.

Education: Habermas studied at the University of Gottingen and the University of Bonn. He

earned a doctorate degree in philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954 with a dissertation
written on the conflict between the absolute and history in Schelling’s thought. He then went on
to study philosophy and sociology at the Institute for Social Research under critical theorists
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno and is considered a member of the Frankfurt School.

Early Career: In 1961, Habermas became a private lecturer in Marburg. The following year he
accepted the position of “extraordinary professor” of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.
That same year, Habermas gained serious public attention in Germany for his first
book Structural Transformation and the Public Sphere in which he detailed the social history of
the development of the bourgeois public sphere. His political interests subsequently led him to
conduct a series of philosophical studies and critical-social analyses that eventually appeared in
his books Toward a Rational Society (1970) and Theory and Practice (1973).

Career and Retirement

In 1964, Habermas became the chair of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt
am Main. He remained there until 1971 in which he accepted a directorship at the Max Planck
Institute in Starnberg. In 1983, Habermas returned to the University of Frankfurt and remained
there until he retired in 1994.Throughout his career, Habermas embraced the critical theory of
the Frankfurt School, which views contemporary Western society as maintaining a problematic
conception of rationality that is destructive in its impulse toward domination. His primary
contribution to philosophy, however, is the development of a theory of rationality, a common
element is seen throughout his work. Habermas believes that the ability to use logic and analysis,
or rationality, goes beyond the strategic calculation of how to achieve a certain goal. He stresses
the importance of having an “ideal speech situation” in which people are able to raise morale and
political concerns and defend them by rationality alone. This concept of the ideal speech
situation was discussed and elaborated on in his 1981 book The Theory of Communicative
Action.Habermas has gained a great deal of respect as a teacher and mentor for many theorists in
political sociology, social theory, and social philosophy. Since his retirement from teaching, he
has continued to be an active thinker and writer. He is currently ranked as one of the most
influential philosophers in the world and is a prominent figure in Germany as a public

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intellectual, often commenting on the controversial issues of the day in German newspapers. In
2007, Habermas was listed as the 7th most-cited author in the humanities.1

INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC SPHERE AND ITS BASIC

TERMINOLOGY
What does it mean that something is "public"? Jürgen Habermas says, "We call events and
occasions 'public' when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs".
‘Public’ no longer described the representative court of a person and their authority. It came to
mean the legitimising regulations of an institutional system that held governing powers. Citizens
were now subsumed under the state forming the public.This notion of the public becomes
evident in terms such as public health, public education, public opinion or public ownership.
They are opposed to the notions of private health, private education, private opinion, and private
ownership. The notion of the public is intrinsically connected to the notion of the private.
Habermas stresses that the notion of the public is related to the notion of the common. 
Habermas defines the public sphere as a "society engaged in critical public
debate". Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas:

 The formation of public opinion

 All citizens have access.
 Conference in unrestricted fashion (based on the freedom of assembly, the freedom of
association, the freedom to expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general
interest, which implies freedom from economic and political control.
 Debate over the general rules governing relations.

Habermas’ definition of a public sphere is the first and founding trigger to classification attempts
of the formation of public opinions and the legitimisation of state and democracy in post-war
Western societies. It is widely accepted as the standard work but has also been widely challenged
as the concept of the public sphere is constantly developing. To get a good grasp of general
criticism and current approaches towards an up-to-date understanding of what and in which ways
public opinions are shaped, general terms of the Habermasian model have to be explained.

The public sphere is seen as a domain of social life where public opinion can be formed. It can
be seen as the breeding ground, if you want. Habermas declares several aspects as vital for the
public sphere. Mainly it is open to all citizens and constituted in every conversation in which
individuals come together to form a public. The citizen plays the role of a private person who is
not acting on behalf of a business or private interests but as one who is dealing with matters of
general interest in order to form a public sphere. There is no intimidating force behind the public
sphere but its citizens assemble and unite freely to express their opinions. The term of a political
public sphere is introduced for public discussions about topics connected to the state and political
practice. Although Habermas considers state power as ‘public power’ which is legitimized
1
Jurgen Habermas - Biography. (2010). The European Graduate School. http://www.egs.edu/library/juergen-
habermas/biography/
Accessed 10 February, 2020, 02.00 PM

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through the public in elections, the state and its forceful practices and powers are not part but are
a counterpart of a public sphere where opinions are formed. Therefore public opinion has to
control the state and its authority in everyday discussions, as well as through formal elections. A
public sphere is the basic requirement to mediate between state and society and in an ideal
situation permits democratic control of state activities. To allow discussions and the formation of
a public opinion a record of state-related activities and legal actions has to be publicly accessible.

Habermas dates the formation of the terms of public sphere and public opinion back to the 18th
century. Before the rise of the Bourgeoisie and the creation of bourgeois public spheres the
understanding of the term ‘public’ was quite different. Before that time the representation of
authority through a lord was called ‘public’ referring to the public representation lords were seen
as. This public representation was merely stating their authorities before the people than for the
people they governed. Although the basic concept of representation through a government or
head of state remained, the attachment to aristocracy was discarded over time. By the end of the
18th century the feudal powers of church and nobility diminished paving the way for the rise of a
bourgeois society in Europe.

Most contemporary conceptualizations of the public sphere are based on the ideas expressed
in Jürgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, which is a translation of
his Habilitationsschrift, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit:Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie
der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft.  The German term Öffentlichkeit (public sphere) encompasses a
variety of meanings and it implies a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings
are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as the collective body constituted by, and in
this process, "the public"..The work is still considered the foundation of contemporary public
sphere theories, and most theorists cite it when discussing their own theories.2
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come
together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public
authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in
the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.
Through this work, he gave a historical-sociological account of the creation, brief flourishing,
and demise of a "bourgeois" public sphere based on rational-critical debate and
discussion: Habermas stipulates that, due to specific historical circumstances, a new civic society
emerged in the eighteenth century. Driven by a need for open commercial arenas where news
and matters of common concern could be freely exchanged and discussed—accompanied by
growing rates of literacy, accessibility to literature, and a new kind of critical journalism—a
separate domain from ruling authorities started to evolve across Europe. "In its clash with the
arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually
replaced a public sphere in which the ruler's power was merely represented before the people
with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical
discourse by the people".

2
 Habermas, Jürgen (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, p. 30, ISBN 978-0-262-58108-
0 Translation from the original German, published 1962.
Accessed 10 February,2020, 02.30 PM

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In his historical analysis, Habermas points out three so-called "institutional criteria" as
preconditions for the emergence of the new public sphere. The discursive arenas, such as
Britain's coffee houses, France's salons, and Germany's Tischgesellschaften "may have differed
in the size and compositions of their publics, the style of their proceedings, the climate of their
debates, and their topical orientations", but "they all organized discussion among people that
tended to be ongoing; hence they had a number of institutional criteria in common"

1. Disregard of status: Preservation of "a kind of social intercourse that, far from

presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. ... Not that this idea of
the public was actually realized in earnest in the coffee houses, salons, and the societies;
but as an idea, it had become institutionalized and thereby stated as an objective claim. If
not realized, it was at least consequential."

2. Domain of common concern: "... discussion within such a public presupposed the

problematization of areas that until then had not been questioned. The domain of
'common concern' which was the object of public critical attention remained a preserve
in which church and state authorities had the monopoly of interpretation. ... The private
people for whom the cultural product became available as a commodity profaned it
inasmuch as they had to determine its meaning on their own (by way of rational
communication with one another), verbalize it, and thus state explicitly what precisely in
its implicitness for so long could assert its authority."
3. Inclusivity: However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never
close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and
found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who –
insofar as they were propertied and educated – as readers, listeners, and spectators could
avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues
discussed became 'general' not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility:
everyone had to be able to participate. ... Wherever the public established itself
institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but
at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as its educator – the
new form of bourgeois representation"
Habermas argued that the bourgeois society cultivated and upheld these criteria. The public
sphere was well established in various locations including coffee shops and salons, areas of
society where various people could gather and discuss matters that concerned them. The coffee
houses in London society at this time became the centers of art and literary criticism, which
gradually widened to include even the economic and the political disputes as matters of
discussion. In French salons, as Habermas says, "opinion became emancipated from the bonds of
economic dependence".[6] Any new work, or a book or a musical composition had to get its
legitimacy in these places. It not only paved a forum for self-expression but in fact had become a
platform for airing one's opinions and agendas for public discussion.

The emergence of a bourgeois public sphere was particularly supported by the 18th-century
liberal democracy making resources available to this new political class to establish a network of

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institutions like publishing enterprises, newspapers and discussion forums, and the democratic
press was the main tool to execute this. The key feature of this public sphere was its separation
from the power of both the church and the government due to its access to a variety of resources,
both economic and social.
As Habermas argues, in due course, this sphere of rational and universalistic politics, free from
both the economy and the State, was destroyed by the same forces that initially established it.
This collapse was due to the consumeristic drive that infiltrated society, so citizens became more
concerned about consumption than political actions. Furthermore, the growth of capitalistic
economy led to an uneven distribution of wealth, thus widening economic polarity. Suddenly the
media became a tool of political forces and a medium for advertising rather than the medium
from which the public got their information on political matters. This resulted in limiting access
to the public sphere and the political control of the public sphere was inevitable for the modern
capitalistic forces to operate and thrive in the competitive economy.
Therewith emerged a new sort of influence, i.e., media power, which, used for purposes of
manipulation, once and for all took care of the innocence of the principle of publicity. The public
sphere, simultaneously restructured and dominated by the mass media, developed into an arena
infiltrated by power in which, by means of topic selection and topical contributions, a battle is
fought not only over influence but over the control of communication flows that affect behavior
while their strategic intentions are kept hidden as much as possible.

OBJECTIVES

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  To study about the concept of Public Sphere given by Jurgen Habermas.
 To study about structural transformation of Public Sphere.
 To study public sphere with democracy and religion.
 To study about public sphere in modern society with reference to advanced technologies.

RESEARCH DESIGN

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The project is of analytical nature and the mode of presentation is analytical and descriptive. The
project is based on secondary sources of data such as journals and articles.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
 What is Public Sphere ?
 What is the Structural Transformation of Public Sphere?
 How is Public Sphere related to Democracy ?
 How is Religion included in Public Sphere ?
 How is Public Sphere in modern society ?

Habermas 's Conceptualization of the Public Sphere

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 Habermas has conceptualized the notion of public sphere as the sphere of private people who
come together as a public to regulate against the public authorities by engaging in a reasoned and
critical debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly
relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. In short, the notion of the public sphere
has been conceived of as a space of reasoned debate about politics and the state. The bourgeoisie
public sphere in its classical form was constituted by private citizens who deliberated on issues
of public concern. The public sphere crossed over both the realms of private sphere and the
sphere of the public authority as a sphere of mediating means between them. This area is
conceptually distinct from the state because it is a site for the production and circulation of
discourses that can in principle be critical of the state. Besides, public sphere is also distinct from
the official economy as it is not an arena of market relations butof discursive relations.

The basic purpose of the public sphere was to monitor and legitimate power via the medium of
public discussions. For Habermas, the public sphere came into being to check power through
rational and critical debate. In his later works, Habermas has modified some of his early
conceptualization of the public sphere. There is a theoretical reason behind this revision on the
conceptualization of the public sphere. Habermas has developed his most central theory, 'The
Theory of Communicative Action' which speaks about actions (the intentional and meaningful
activity of a person) oriented towards understanding , that is, action based on a consensus of
definitions regarding situations dependent upon the mutual recognition of perceptions of the
environment , social norms, and the identities of individuals. His communicative action also
refers to a meaningful interaction between persons. It entails the establishing or maintaining of a
social relationship between two or more individuals. Communicative action thus embraces both
consensual action and action oriented to reaching an understanding. In the later notion of the
public sphere, Habermas has heavily drawn the conceptualization of the public sphere from the
Theory of Communicative Action. It is partly because he believes that communicative action
involves validity claims and it can help to arrive at an uncoerced consensus where social actions
are initiated not by intimidating or manipulation but by valid reasons. Habermas stresses the
capacity of human communication to foster a more reasonable society which in fact is the
principle aim of his concept of the public sphere.3

We can clearly see that earlier, Habermas did not underscore the importance of the
communicative rationality which is a backbone in his later thought. So he describes the public
sphere as a space of reasoned debate about politics or the intermediary space between the state
and private interests of the members of the bourgeoisie class. He then emphasized on the aspect
that public sphere denotes a space in which individuals who are otherwise live privately and have
their own private concerns come together to discuss matter of politics. However, drawing from
his communicative reason, Habermas redefines his notion of the public sphere as a network of
communicating information and points of view about political aspects. He also mentions that
communicative action also reproduces the public sphere. Further, he states that there are three
aspects of argumentative speech. One of the aspects, that is, the production of cogent argument
constitutes its third feature; and it aims to produce cogent arguments that are convincing in virtue
of their intrinsic properties and with which validity claims can be redeemed or rejected.
3
Hohendahl, Peter, and Patricia Russian. “Jürgen Habermas: ‘The Public Sphere’ (1964).” New German Critique, no. 3,
1974, pp. 45–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/487736. Accessed 1 Mar. 2020.

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Habermas says later that his conceptualization of the public sphere is related to this third feature.
Further, Habermas argued that public sphere is a social phenomenon. It is different from the
concept of social order because public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly
not as an organization. So, Habermas redefines public sphere as a network for communicating
information and points of view. These streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and
synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specific public opinions.
So he argues that the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action. For it, mastery
of language suffices and it is tailored to the general comprehensibility of everyday
communicative practice. The public sphere is also not specialized in the fields like religion,
education and the family. It is also not specialized in other fields like science, morality etc unless
these systems extends to politically relevant questions. Rather, the public sphere refers to the
social space stands open, in principle, for potential dialogue partners about political discussions.
In that the public audiences possess final authority because it is constitutive for the internal
structure and reproduction of the public sphere.

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 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is Habermas's examination of a kind of

publicity that originated in the eighteenth century, but still has modern relevance. It begins by
attempting to demarcate what Habermas calls the bourgeois public sphere. He defines the public
sphere as the sphere of private people who join together to form a "public." He traces the history
of the division between public and private in language and philosophy.
Before the bourgeois public sphere came representative publicity, which existed from the Middle
Ages until the eighteenth century. It involved the king or lord representing himself before an
audience; the King was the only public person, and all others were spectators. The public and
private realms were not separated. Economic developments were vital in the evolution of the
public sphere. Habermas emphasizes the role of capitalist modes of production, and of the long-
distance trade in news and commodities in this evolution. The most important feature of the
public sphere as it existed in the eighteenth century was the public use of reason in rational-
critical debate. This checked domination by the state, or the illegitimate use of power. Rational-
critical debate occurred within the bourgeois reading public, in response to literature, and in
institutions such as salons and coffee-houses. Habermas sees the public sphere as developing out
of the private institution of the family, and from what he calls the "literary public sphere", where
discussion of art and literature became possible for the first time. The public sphere was by
definition inclusive, but entry depended on one's education and qualification as a property owner.
Habermas emphasizes the role of the public sphere as a way for civil society to articulate its
interests.

The development of the fully political public sphere occurred first in Britain in the eighteenth
century. The public sphere became institutionalized within the European bourgeois constitutional
states of the nineteenth century, where public consensus was enshrined as a way of checking
domination. The fully developed public sphere was therefore dependent on many social
conditions, which eventually shifted.4

Habermas argues that the self-intepretation of the public sphere took shape in the concept of
"public opinion", which he considers in the light of the work of Kant, Marx, Hegel, Mill and
Tocqueville. The bourgeois public sphere eventually eroded because of economic and structural
5
changes. The boundaries between state and society blurred, leading to what Habermas calls the

4
Habermas, Jürgen, Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)
Accessed 1 March, 2020, 04.00 PM

Calhoun, Craig (1992), ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Accessed 1 March, 2020, 06.00 PM

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refeudalization of society. State and society became involved in each other's spheres; the private
sphere collapsed into itself. The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate – was
replaced by leisure, and private people no longer existed as a public of property owners.
Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it
attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture consensus.
This is particularly evident in modern politics, with the rise of new disciplines such as
advertising and public relations. These, and large non- governmental organizations, replace the
old institutions of the public sphere. The public sphere takes on a feudal aspect again, as
politicians and organizations represent themselves before the voters. Public opinion is now
manipulative, and, more rarely, still critical. We still need a strong public sphere to check
domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope
that power and domination may not be permanent features.

Democracy and the Public Sphere

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 Habermas has not elaborately discussed the relation between public sphere and democracy
earlier. In his later thought, he asserts that democracy must be seen first and foremost as a
process that results when a certain kind of social interaction prevails. Democracy should be seen
as a particular way by which citizens make collective and rational decisions-a way that can be
made dependent on a consensus arrived at through discussion free from domination.17 Then, if
there is a strong connection between the public sphere and democracy according to Habermas,
what kind of democracy would be well suited to the structures of the public sphere? To this
question, Habermas replies by referring to the idealized distinction between liberal and
republican understanding of politics. Liberal model of democracy, accordi ngtohimisnot
conducive for making collective and rational decisions because in this model, politics is
essentially a struggle for position that grant access to administrative power. In this model,
democracy is regarded as an instrument to safeguard only liberties of individuals. Also,
Republican model of democracy, he argues, is not feasible for arriving at rational decisions. This
model tends to render liberty dependent on popular judgments about the best means of achieving
collective aims or on the collective commitments contingently embraced by a particular
community. It also views that citizens' political opinion and will formation forms the medium
through which society constitutes itself as a political whole.

Habermas then delineates a model of democracy which works in consonance with the public
sphere, i.e., 'Discursive model of democracy'. He also calls it radical democracy. The discursive
democracy, he argues, is founded on the abstract ideal of a self organizing community of free
and equal citizens coordinating their collective affairs through their common reasons. Discursive
democracy puts public reasoning, generated by the public sphere, at the centre of political
justification. For it, democracy is a system of social and political arrangement that institutionally
ties the exercise of collective power to free reasoning among equals. 6The central idea Habermas
propounds in his democracy is that democratic procedures should produce rational outcomes.
Thus, in discursive democracy, the communicative structures of the public sphere constitute a far
flung network of sensors that react to the pressure of society wide problems and stimulate
influential opinions. It is also founded on a network of associations that specialize in discovering
issues relevant for all society, contributing possible solutions to problems, interpreting values
and producing good reasons. In radical democracy, people have the final authority and any
decisions are collectively taken by considering all the reasonable objective and alternatives
solution that are generated by the participants during the deliberation. So, in such conditions,
rational outcomes have emerged and there is no question of influentially justified decisions. He
further advocates that for the successful democracy, to have deliberation is so important. It is
because the virtues of deliberative views are intrinsic and allied closely with its conception of
binding collective choice, in particular with the role in that conception of the idea of reasons
6
Singh, Mayengbam Nandakishwor. “JURGEN HABERMAS'S NOTION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A PERSPECTIVE ON
THE CONCEPTUAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN HIS THOUGHT.” The Indian Journal of Political Science, vol. 73, no. 4, 2012,
pp. 633–642., www.jstor.org/stable/41858870. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

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acceptable to others whose conduct is governed by those choices, and who themselves have
reasonable views. Moreover, it also states a forceful idea of political legitimacy for a democracy.
To Habermas, the present day practices of democracy look as matter of selecting representatives
among competing elites through regular elections or simply as a matter of ensuing through such
selection.21 And democracy as a form of self rule that requires the legitimate exercise of
political power by government has not been practiced. However, he argues through public
sphere, democratic institutions can be made open to all equal citizens for the rational
deliberation. Democratic discourse through the public sphere develop the autonomy of
participants - that is, their capacities to engage in critical examination of self and others, engage
in reasoning process, and arrive at judgments they can defend in argument. And it is precisely
these capacities and dispositions that democracy needs to work well.22 Therefore, Habermas
argues that democratic legitimacy should not be measured not just in terms of law being enacted
by a majority, but in terms of the discursive quality of the full process of deliberation leading
upto such a result.

Degeneration of the Political Public Sphere in Late Capitalist Societies

Habermas is concerned about the possibility of public debate being eroded in contemporary
societies, as the public is increasingly expected merely to choose between the election manifestos
of the two or more competing political parties with no opportunity to debate more fundamental
issues, or indeed for public debate and scrutiny to feed into the election process. The mere fact
that a party has won the election according to the existing rules seems sufficient to guarantee it
(and the political system as a whole) legitimacy. This, for Habermas is not the correct way to
acquire legitimacy by the state. He is, in fact, pessimistic about his inability to find in advanced
capitalists societies an institutional basis for effective political public sphere corresponding in
character and function to that of early capitalism and state formation. Habermas opines that
welfare state democracy demands that states legitimate themselves by demonstrating that their
policies serve the overall interests of their constituents. This is a result not only of state
intervention as such but also of the transformation of the public sphere into an arena in which a
wide range of social interests vie for state action. Because those interests conflict, states are left
to face a crisis in which they are unable simultaneously to produce adequate motivation for work
and loyalty to the existing regime. Also, the arrangement of formal democratic institutions and
procedures permits administrative decisions to be made largely independent of specific motives
of the citizens. This takes place through a legitimization process that elicits generalized motive
diffused mass loyalty but avoids participation. This structural alteration of the bourgeoisie public
realm provides for application of institutions and procedures that are democratic in form, while
the citizenry, in the midst of an objectively political society, enjoy the status of passive citizens.
Secondly, Habermas also argues that advanced capitalist society cannot be conceptualized as a
social totality, because it is split into separate realms integrated on different bases. The 'lifeworlď

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is the realm of the personal relationships and communicative action. But to it is counter posed a
system which is constituted by way of more impersonal and strategic exchange of money and
power within the context of the economy and modern administrative state. This split cannot be
overcome, he argues, because there is no immanent logic of capitalism to produce its dialectical
transcendence and because large scale modern society would be impossible without such
systemic integration; and hopes of doing away with such large scale societal integration are not
only romantic but dangerous because reduction in scale can come about only in catastrophic
ways. Thus, Habermas proposes a probable means to bring social integration. Communicative
action provides an alternative to money and power as a basis for societal integration. He idealizes
the directly interpersonal relations of the lifeworld as counterpoint to systemic integration with
its dehumanization and reification. However, Habermas continues to see development of the
welfare state capitalism as producing impasses but destroying earlier bases for addressing
problems. Further, he seems not to have full faith in the capacity of either the public sphere as
such or of socialist transformation of civil society. And this is why Habermas believes in an
evolutionary account of human communication capacity.

Inclusion of Religion in the Public Sphere

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 Habermas made no reference about the inclusion of religion in his earlier theory of public
sphere. It is precisely because he felt that religious validity claims do not fit easily into either the
category of moral discourses or of ethical discourses. However, in his recent essays, there is a
shift in his position. There are two reasons for his shift in position regarding public discussion of
religion. The first is the recent development in biotechnology that threatens to instrumentalise
human nature and fundamentally endanger our understanding of ourselves as members of human
species. The second is the perceived emptiness of western models of modernization following
terrorist attacks by religious fundamentalists. He now pleas for a post secular, democratic, public
sphere in which participants in discussion would be open to the cognitive contents religious and
non-religious contributions. In this, secularly minded citizens are required to adopt a self-critical
attitude towards the limits of secular rationality and strive to be open to the power of religious
reasons; religiously minded citizens are required to acknowledge the secular basis of political
authority and to accept the validity of core liberal democratic principles such as equality and
liberty.7

However, Habermas makes a strong condition in this regard, that is, inclusion of religion in
public sphere is permissible only when thematization of religious claims happens within the
domains as described by him as the weak publics of civil society which are primarily concerned
with opinion formation. In fact, his call for inclusion of religion in public discussion does not
relate to the legislative and decision making bodies. So citizens who hold office in the legislative
and decision making bodies are required to formulate their contribution to discussions in secular
terms. Thus, there is a need for translation. This requirement of translation must be conceived as
a cooperative task by both non-religious citizens and religious citizens. Believers and non
believers must work together to translate the results of their discussions in the weak publics into
commonly accessible, secular language.

Besides, Habermas calls for a democratic public sphere in which religion and non religious
contributions would be granted an equal hearing in discussion. This is a stark contrast to John
Rawls's model of political liberalism in which citizens are required to leave behind their religious
worldviews when they engage in deliberation and decision making in the public and political
domain. Acknowledging the inherent significant role the religion plays in the life of religious
believers, Habermas terms Rawls's model as an intolerable psychological burden. Unlike Rawls,
Habermas does not seem to overlook the fact that religious faith constitutes their entire lives for
religious believers. And most significantly, for Habermas, the discussion of religion in the public
discussion does not extend to the official political spheres of democratic legislation and decision
making in which only argumentative formulated in a secular language are permissible. However,
it must be mentioned at the end that Habermas's discourse about the religion in his notion of the
7
Mathews, Matthew T. “THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGIOUS MEANING IN THE CRITICAL THEORY OF
JÜRGEN HABERMAS.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 82, no. 3/4, 1999, pp. 383–399. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/41178949. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020. 07.30 PM

15 | P a g e
public sphere is not yet comprehensive. Though a later development, Habermas's framework of
public discussion of religion still has its limitations, and it is yet to be fully theorized.

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 Globalization, New Technologies, and New Public Spheres

In the contemporary high-tech societies there is emerging a significant expansion and redefinition
of the public sphere is going beyond Habermas, to conceive of the public sphere as a site of
information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organization that includes the
broadcasting media and new cyberspaces as well as the face-to-face interactions of everyday life.
These developments, connected primarily with multimedia and computer technologies, require a
reformulation and expansion of the concept of the public sphere -- as well as our notions of the
critical or committed intellectual and notion of the public intellectual. Previously, radio, television,
and the other electronic media of communication tended to be closed to critical and oppositional
voices both in systems controlled by the state and by private corporations. Public access and low
power television, and community and guerilla radio, however, opened these technologies to
intervention and use by critical intellectuals. radio, television, and other electronic modes of
communication were creating new public spheres of debate, discussion, and information; hence,
activists and intellectuals who wanted to engage the public, to be where the people were at, and
who thus wanted to intervene in the public affairs of their society should make use of these
technologies and develop communication politics and new media projects.8

The rise of the Internet expands the realm for democratic participation and debate and creates new
public spaces for political intervention. first broadcast media like radio and television, and now
computers, have produced new public spheres and spaces for information, debate, and participation
that contain both the potential to invigorate democracy and to increase the dissemination of critical
and progressive ideas as well as new possibilities for manipulation, social control, the promotion of
conservative positions, and intensifying of differences between haves and have nots. But
participation in these new public spheres computer bulletin boards and discussion groups, talk
radio and television, and the emerging sphere of what we call cyberspace democracy require
critical intellectuals to gain new technical skills and to master new technologies9.

 A new democratic politics will thus be concerned that new media and computer technologies be
used to serve the interests of the people and not corporate elites. A democratic politics will strive to
see that broadcast media and computers are used to inform and enlighten individuals rather than to
manipulate them. A democratic politics will teach individuals how to use the new technologies, to
articulate their own experiences and interests, and to promote democratic debate and diversity,
allowing a full range of voices and ideas to become part of the cyberdemocracy of the future.
  Now more than ever, public debate over the use of new technologies is of utmost importance to the
future of democracy. Who will control the media and technologies of the future, and debates over
8
Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press(1979)
Accesed 4 March, 2020, 07.00 PM

9
Media Culture. London and New York: Routledge (1995)
Accessed 4 March, 2020, 07.10 PM

17 | P a g e
the public's access to media, media accountability and responsibility, media funding and regulation,
and what kinds of culture are best for cultivating individual freedom, democracy, and human
happiness and well-being will become increasingly important in the future. The proliferation of
media culture and computer technologies focuses attention on the importance of new technologies
and the need for public intervention in debates over the future of media culture and communications
in the information highways and entertainment by-ways of the future. The technological revolution
of our time thus involves the creation of new public spheres and the need for democratic strategies
to promote the project of democratization and to provide access to more people to get involved in
more political issues and struggles so that democracy might have a chance in the new millennium.

Increased intensification of technological revolution in our era undermines Habermas's own

fundamental distinction between production and interaction, since production obviously is
structured by increased information and communication networks, while the latter are increasingly
generated and structured by technology. Hence, where Habermas earlier argued that production is
governed by the logic of instrumental action, whereas relations in the lifeworld are governed by the
logic of communicative action, more and more communicative action is playing a direct role in
production, as information technology, communications, and interpersonal interaction structure the
field of labor, and more modes of instrumental action become constitutive aspects of everyday life,
as my typing this article on a computer, or sending e-mail to the editor of this volume, would
suggest. Habermas's project is undermined by too rigid categorical distinctions between classical
liberal and contemporary public spheres, between system and lifeworld, and production and
interaction. Such dualistic conceptions are themselves vitated, by technological revolution in which
media and technology play vital roles on both sides of Habermas's categorical divide, subverting
his bifurcations.10

Yet it is the merit of Habermas's analysis to focus attention on the nature and the structural
transformations of the public sphere and its functions within contemporary society. we should
expand this analysis to take account of the technological revolution and global restructuring of
capitalism that is currently taking place and rethink the critical theory of society and democratic
politics in the light of these developments. some of the ways that Habermas's Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere provides a more promising starting point for critical theory
and radical democracy than his later philosophy of language and communication and have
suggested that thinking through the contributions and limitations of his work can productively
advance the project of understanding and democratically transforming contemporary society. In
particular, as we move into a new millennium, an expanded public sphere and new challenges and
threats to democracy render Habermas's work an indispensable component of a new critical theory
that must, however, go beyond his positions in crucial ways.

MAJOR FINDINGS
The various conclusion that can be drawn after the study of the theory of Public Sphere given by
Jurgen Habermas are :-

10
Stevenson, Nick. “Habermas, Mass Culture and the Future of the Public Sphere.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology,
vol. 38, 1993, pp. 221–245. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41035472. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020, 08.00 PM.

18 | P a g e
1. Public sphere as the sphere of private people who come together as a public to regulate
against the public authorities by engaging in a reasoned and critical debate over the
general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere
of commodity exchange and social labor.

2. The basic purpose of the public sphere was to monitor and legitimate power via the
medium of public discussions.

3. The bourgeois public sphere eventually eroded because of economic and structural
changes. The boundaries between state and society blurred, leading to what Habermas
calls the refeudalization of society.

4. Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it
attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture
consensus.

5. Habermas delineates a model of democracy which works in consonance with the public
sphere, i.e., 'Discursive model of democracy'. He also calls it radical democracy. The
discursive democracy, he argues, is founded on the abstract ideal of a self organizing
community of free and equal citizens coordinating their collective affairs through their
common reasons. Discursive democracy puts public reasoning, generated by the public
sphere.

6. The recent development in biotechnology that threatens to instrumentalise human nature

and fundamentally endanger our understanding of ourselves as members of human
species. The perceived emptiness of western models of modernization following terrorist
attacks by religious fundamentalists. He pleas for a post secular, democratic, public
sphere in which participants in discussion would be open to the cognitive contents
religious and non-religious contributions. In this, secularly minded citizens are required
to adopt a self-critical attitude towards the limits of secular rationality and strive to be
open to the power of religious reasons; religiously minded citizens are required to
acknowledge the secular basis of political authority.

7. In the contemporary high-tech societies there is emerging a significant expansion and

redefinition of the public sphere is going beyond Habermas, to conceive of the public
sphere as a site of information, discussion, contestation, political struggle, and organization
that includes the broadcasting media and new cyberspaces as well as the face-to-face
interactions of everyday life. These developments, connected primarily with multimedia
and computer technologies, require a reformulation and expansion of the concept of the
public sphere .

8. Habermas's project is undermined by too rigid categorical distinctions between classical

liberal and contemporary public spheres, between system and lifeworld, and production
and interaction. Such dualistic conceptions are themselves vitated, by technological
revolution in which media and technology play vital roles on both sides of Habermas's
categorical divide, subverting his bifurcations.
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 CONCLUSION
The public sphere is ‘a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be
formed’ It's a metaphor for thinking about how individual human beings come together to
exchange ideas and information and feelings, about how large-scale communities manage

20 | P a g e
themselves when too many individuals are involved to simply list the issues that affect them all
and have each one explain, face to face, their position. It's a metaphor which keeps us focused on
the distinction between individual, personal forms of representation over which we have a large
degree of control and shared, consensual representations which are never exactly what we would
like to see precisely because they are shared (public). It's a liberal model which sees the
individual human being as having an important input into the formation of the general will as
opposed to totalitarian or Marxist models, which see the state as ultimately powerful in deciding
what people think. This is the public sphere.

Public sphere was a very new concept in 1962, because it was an aid for democracy, at the time
when dictatorship, monarchy and oligarchy was prevalent. But it holds more importance in
today’s world because it shows the importance of public opinion and individuality in the society.
Where there is no Public Sphere, there is no right of speech and expression and the best example
of this is China. In China the ruling party that is the government has put restrains in everything
as there is no free media there, everything is published and displayed according to the will of the
ruling party, all this does nothing but curbs the individuality of a person. Public sphere can be
framed according to the government very easily by spreading wrong information in the public
domain, this is the reason why Public Sphere is not free (due to the invasion of ruling party in it).
Any society where Public Sphere is absent can never be peaceful because the citizens or the
members of that society can never be happy or satisfied.

REFERENCES

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1. Jurgen Habermas - Biography. (2010). The European Graduate School.
http://www.egs.edu/library/juergen-habermas/biography/

2. Habermas, Jürgen (1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An

Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, Cambridge
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, p. 30, ISBN 978-0-262-58108-0 Translation from the
original German, published 1962.

3. Hohendahl, Peter, and Patricia Russian. “Jürgen Habermas: ‘The Public Sphere’
(1964).” New German Critique, no. 3, 1974, pp. 45–48. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/487736

4. .Habermas, Jürgen, Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)

5. Calhoun, Craig (1992), ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The MIT Press

6. Singh, Mayengbam Nandakishwor. “JURGEN HABERMAS'S NOTION OF THE

PUBLIC SPHERE: A PERSPECTIVE ON THE CONCEPTUAL
TRANSFORMATIONS IN HIS THOUGHT.” The Indian Journal of Political Science,
vol. 73, no. 4, 2012, pp. 633–642., www.jstor.org/stable/41858870

7. Mathews, Matthew T. “THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGIOUS MEANING IN THE

CRITICAL THEORY OF JÜRGEN HABERMAS.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary
Journal, vol. 82, no. 3/4, 1999, pp. 383–399. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41178949.

8. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston: Beacon Press(1979)

9. Media Culture. London and New York: Routledge (1995)

10. Stevenson, Nick. “Habermas, Mass Culture and the Future of the Public
Sphere.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 38, 1993, pp. 221–245. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/41035472.

BOOKS :-

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1. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of
Bourgeois Society by JURGEN HABERMAS

2. Habermas & the Public Sphere by CRAIG CALHOUN

3. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public
Sphere by Alexander Kluge and  Oskar Negt 

4. The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere by Judith Butler ,  Jurgen Habermas and
Charles Taylor

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