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Political Theory
40(6) 822-829
The Public Sphere: © 20 1 2 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
http://ptx.sagepub.com
©SAGE
Amy Allen1
Corresponding Author:
Amy Allen, Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, 6035 Thornton Hall, Hanover,
NH 05055
Email: Amy.R.Allen@dartmouth.edu
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Allen 823
Once one decides to read STPS through the lens of feminist theory, how-
ever, the de facto exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere
appears rather obvious. But feminist critics of the work made a stronger
point, namely, that the exclusion of women from the bourgeois public sphere
is not accidental or contingent but rather constitutive of that space. If the
bourgeois public sphere is constitutively exclusionary, then as Nancy Fraser
puts it in her extremely influential feminist critique of STPS , "we can no
longer assume that the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere was
simply an unrealized Utopian ideal; it was also an ideological notion" that
served to rationalize an historically emergent form of class, race, and gender
domination.3
In response to this line of criticism, Habermas not only acknowledges that
the bourgeois public sphere excludes women, perhaps surprisingly, he also
bites the bullet and accepts that this exclusion is a constitutive rather than a
contingent feature of the bourgeois public sphere. Although the exclusion of
women shares some features with the exclusion of workers and peasants,
"unlike the exclusion of underprivileged men," Habermas concedes, "the
exclusion of women had a structuring significance."4 And yet, the feminist
argument for the constitutively exclusionary nature of the bourgeois public
sphere does not, Habermas insists, "dismiss rights to unrestricted inclusion
and equality, which are an integral part of the liberal public sphere's self-
interpretation, but rather appeals to them."5 In other words, in claiming the
bourgeois public sphere is founded upon the constitutive exclusion of women,
feminists implicitly appeal to the core ideals of that very public sphere -
inclusion and equal participation. What's more, the universalistic discourses
of the bourgeois public sphere have a potential for self-transformation that
allows the public sphere itself to be transformed through its contact with
social movements such as the feminist movement.6 The bourgeois public
sphere may be ideological, but it is not mere ideology.7
This suggests that the proper response to the feminist critique is not to
reject the ideal of the public sphere altogether, but rather to reformulate the
liberal-bourgeois conception of it that Habermas articulates in STPS and to
develop an alternative, post-bourgeois conception.8 Fraser delineates four
specific assumptions of the bourgeois public sphere that need to be recast in
order to make the concept serviceable for feminist critical theory. First, the
bourgeois model assumes incorrectly that it is possible for people to bracket
existing status hierarchies and participate as if they were peers in public dis-
cussions of matters of common concern; against this assumption, and in line
with some of Habermas's own reflections at the end of STPS , Fraser insists
that social equality is a necessary condition for political democracy.9 Second,
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824 Political Theory 40(6)
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Allen 825
different set of exclusions in Habermas 's public sphere theory. Even in its
reformulated version, presented in Between Facts and Norms , this model
implicitly presupposes what Fraser calls a "Westphalian political imaginary"
in the sense that it tacitly assumes the relevant frame for the public sphere to
be that of "a bounded political community with its own territorial state."18
Precisely this frame can no longer be presupposed in light of current condi-
tions of transnational publicity. In other words, under current conditions of
globalization, the public sphere has undergone - and is still undergoing - a
new structural transformation.19
In his recent work in political theory, in particular in his theoretical and
political reflections on the European Union and on the prospects for the con-
stitutionalization of international law, Habermas has reflected on this trans-
formation. With respect to Europe, drawing on his argument about the role of
the public sphere in securing democratic legitimacy in Between Facts and
Norms , Habermas argues that the administrative and political power of the
EU can have democratic legitimacy only to the extent that it is rooted in a -
not yet existing - European public sphere.20 Against Euro-skeptics, Habermas
argues that European political integration need not be based on a pre-existing
European identity; rather, the requisite forms of European political identity
and civic solidarity could be generated in a suitably configured transnational
European public sphere.21
With respect to the global public sphere, Habermas worries that the emerg-
ing communicative structures of informal global public spheres cannot be
efficacious so long as there are no constitutionally institutionalized mecha-
nisms for translating the public will generated in such spheres into binding
political power. The global protests against the start of the Iraq war in 2003
provided a poignant example of this efficacy deficit. Nevertheless Habermas
is cautiously optimistic that the opinions and wills generated in such global
public spheres could be efficacious if directed at a global institution - a dra-
matically reformed UN - that would be charged with the limited goals of
preventing violence and protecting human rights and empowered with the
political muscle to achieve those goals. To be democratically legitimate, such
a global institution would have to be rooted in a global public sphere, but
such a sphere need not be held together by thick forms of political identity or
civic solidarity; rather, "shared moral outrage over gross violations of human
rights provides a sufficient basis for solidarity among world citizens" anďthe
achievement of such a thin form of global solidarity is not, in Habermas 's
view, an "insuperable hurdle."22
To be sure, one might be much more skeptical than Habermas is about the
current prospects for developing either European civic solidarity - especially
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826
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Allen 827
first posed fifty years ago in STPS : is it merely ideology? In other words, can
the concept of the public sphere be reconstructed in a way that makes it ser-
viceable for a critical theory that has adopted not just a transnational and
post-Westphalian but also a postcolonial perspective? I cannot answer this
question here. But in closing I would just like to note that answering this
question will require critically interrogating the modernist theory of history
that underpins the normativity of Habermasian critical theory.31 In confront-
ing this question, we will also have to be careful not to presuppose that we
know how inclusion and equality in the context of neocolonial and neoimpe-
rial power relations is possible, that we know what form it will take and what
rules or procedures will structure it, for doing so threatens to obscure rather
than to illuminate the ideological nature and functions of our current concep-
tion of the public sphere.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Notes
1 . On this point, see the contributions by Joan Landes and Mary Ryan in Habermas
and the Public Sphere , ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
2. On the exclusion of workers and peasants, see Habermas, Structural Transfor-
mation. , 84-88 and 124-25; on the role of the family in the formation of the
bourgeois public sphere, see pp. 43-5 1 .
3. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of
Actually Existing Democracy," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflec-
tions on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1996), 76.
4. Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermas and
the Public Sphere , 428.
5. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," 429.
6. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," 429.
7. Habermas had already acknowledged as much in STPS , though without noting
the gendered aspects of this ideology; see Habermas, Structural Transformation ,
88, 160, 235.
8. See Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 76.
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828 Political Theory 40(6)
9. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 77-80. One could argue that this is
one of the main points of Habermas' s argument in the closing section of STPS,
in which he raises doubts about whether genuinely inclusive discourse can be
achieved without social equality - for workers - and discusses the prospects for
a post-bourgeois public sphere. Fraser's point, I take it, is that, in his historical
reconstruction, Habermas does not adequately problematize this assumption of
the bourgeois conception of the public sphere, particularly as it relates to the
exclusion of women.
10. Habermas does briefly discuss the role of "intraorganizational public spheres" -
by which he means political parties and special-interest groups - in creating
possibilities for "critical publicity." See STPS , 244-50. At this point, he seems
quite pessimistic about the prospects such public spheres have for combatting
the leveling effects of the mass opinions generated by the culture industry. Of
course, this situation would have appeared quite different by the time that Fra-
ser's critique was written, given the emergence in the meantime of the new social
movements such as second-wave feminism, which, rather than political parties,
serve as the model for Fraser's subaltern counterpublics.
1 1 . Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 80-85.
12. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 85-89. For related discussion, see also
Fraser, "Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of
Clarence Thomas," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus ; and Seyla Benhabib, "Models
of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,"
in Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 100.
13. Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," 89-92.
14. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse The-
ory of Law and Democracy , trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
15. On "alternative" publics, see Habermas, Between Facts and Norms , 373-74; on
informal (weak) versus institutional (strong) publics, see pp. 306-8; on the rela-
tionship between equality and democracy, see pp. 420-23.
16. See Between Facts and Norms , 419-26, and Habermas, "On the Internal Rela-
tion between the Rule of Law and Democracy," in Habermas, The Inclusion of
the Other: Studies in Political Theory , ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
17. Between Facts and Norms , 426.
18. Nancy Fraser, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and
Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World," Theory, Culture, and
Society 24, no. 4 (2007): 7-30, p. 8.
19. Ibid., 15.
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Allen
20. Habermas, "Does Europe Need a Constitution?" in Time of Transitions , ed. and
trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 102-6.
21. Habermas, "Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary, and Is
It Possible?" in Habermas, The Divided West , ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). On this point, see also Habermas, "The
Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," in Habermas, The
Postnational Constellation : Political Essays , ed. and trans. Max Pensky
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 98-103.
22. Habermas, "Is the Development of a European Identity Necessary," 80. See also
Habermas, "Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a
Chance?" in Habermas, The Divided West , 142-43.
23. On the latter point, see William Scheuerman, "Global Governance without
Global Government? Habermas on Postnational Democracy," Political Theory
36, no. 1 (2008): 133-51.
24. Fraser distinguishes between the efficacy and legitimacy critiques of the public
sphere; I am mostly concerned here with the latter. See Fraser, "Transnationaliz-
ing the Public Sphere," and "Öffentlichkeit," in Habermas-Handbuch , ed. Hauke
Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont (Stuttgart: JB Metzler Verlag,
2009).
25. Fraser, "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere," 16.
26. Ibid., 18.
27. Ibid., 19.
28. See the following responses to Fraser's essay, "Transnationalizing the Public
Sphere," in the same issue of Theory ; Culture and Society : Kimberly Hutchings,
"Whose History? Whose Justice?" 59-63; Shalini Randeria, "De-politicization
of Democracy and Judicialization of Politics, "3 8-44; Armando Salvatore, "The
Exit from a Westphalian Framing of Political Space and the Emergence of a
Transnational Islamic Public," 45-52; and Oscar Ugarteche, "Transnationalizing
the Public Sphere: A Critique of Fraser," 65-69.
29. Hutchings, "Whose History?" 62.
30. For an important discussion of the relationship between the normative proj-
ect of Habermasian critical theory, with its emphasis on ideas of progress and
human development, and the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and racism,
see Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
31. On this point, see also Hutchings, "Whose History?"
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