Public sphere has evolved significantly over last two centuries

Public sphere has evolved significantly over last two centuries

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the local coffeehouses of European cities were the gathering places for people who wanted to exchange ideas about the latest news in business, politics or science. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas would later coin the phrase “the public sphere” to describe such social arenas where public opinion was formed, often in opposition to the political interests of the state.

Today, the coffeehouse persists as a popular gathering place, but its influence on the public sphere has been replaced over the last two centuries by modern media and the Internet — new places for the discourse on issues of local, regional or even global relevance.

This changed face of the public sphere, its history and current status were the topic of a conference last month at Rice University that brought scholars from a range of fields — from history and literary studies to international relations, anthropology and philosophy — to examine the evolution of the public sphere and to ask whether Habermas’ original concept remains relevant. Joachim Whaley and Nicholas Boyle, both from the University of Cambridge, England, set the stage by reassessing the relevance of the public sphere within 17th- and 18th-century Germany. The following sessions surveyed not only the current state of research, covering the emergence and social function of public intellectuals and the relationship between private and public modernity, but also the link between science, philosophy and the public sphere.

James Tully, the distinguished professor of political science, law, indigenous governance and philosophy at the University of Victoria, Canada, capped the conference with a keynote address giving his impressions of this intersection of commercial, political and cultural interests on a global level.

“In light of globalization, there are two public spheres: the civil public sphere and the civic public sphere,” he said. The former is a cosmopolitan democracy governed by laws and procedures; the latter is akin to the World Social Forum, an open platform for reflective thinking and democratic debate, and sustained through participation by the people.

Tully left no question as to which he favored: The civil public sphere is “a failed model,” he said. “It has created absolutely intolerable inequalities in the name of democratic control.”

Spread through European imperialism in the 19th century, the civil public sphere accepts that citizenship, and thus participation in the public sphere, is derived through the imposition and enforcement of laws. Citizens have a say in lawmaking through established practices and institutions of elected representative government, a system of courts and a bill of rights. Laws “civilize” the people, creating “citizens” and “civilization.”

“A central discussion within the European public sphere [in the 19th century] was how to ‘civilize’ the non-European world,” Tully said. He noted this discourse ignored the fact that these “uncivilized” societies actually did have law institutions in place — they did not rest merely on European traditions.

In contrast stands the civic public sphere, Tully said, where citizens’ rights and responsibilities of having a say in the making of laws exist by the very virtue of their being governed. Participation in this public sphere is a civic responsibility and duty for both the rulers and the ruled, not merely an option as in the civil tradition. The citizens question and challenge the government, and the government looks to be challenged and seeks feedback from the governed. “It’s through dialogue that governors become good rulers and the governed become good citizens,” he said.

Moreover, “if the government won’t participate in the dialogue, the people exercise political power themselves, taking back the power that they had granted the government,” Tully said.

While imperial globalization of the civil public sphere continues, the global civic public sphere persists: Regions, such as India, exist where legal and political pluralism survived European imperialism, and civic public spheres have emerged in resistance to European imperial rule.

Tully argued that the World Social Forum sees itself in opposition to the World Economic Forum, committing itself to a diversity of publics, identifying itself as a “translator” rather than a “ruler” and defining itself as a nongovernmental agency. It even seeks to set up public universities of social discourse, which revisits the very origins of the public sphere.

Organized by Christian Emden, assistant professor of German at Rice, and David Midgley of the University of Cambridge, “Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere” is a two-year research collaboration between Rice University, represented by the School of Humanities and the Center for European Studies, and the University of Cambridge represented by the Center for the Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and the Department of German.

The research project seeks to examine the changes the public sphere has undergone as a conceptual model and as a discursive formation of actual political culture from early modern Europe to the contemporary world. A second conference will take place in Cambridge
July 10-12.