The book would be better titled the structural transformations... as it is really about a couple of different movements in the socio-structural totality and the way that the public sphere fits into them. The final couple of chapters provide a nice overview of the changes that happened most recently, but all of them are somewhat related. His basic argument is that the public sphere isn't just an incedental attribute of modern bourgeois society (here "bourgeois" as the translator indicates, is often synonymous with "civic" or "civil" society, but since the German doesn't have a precise translation into English, he uses this to be safe) Actually this ambivalent terminology is somewhat central to his argument. Several of the pivotal terms in his social history are important precisely in the way that they change in their meaning over time. "Public opinion" is the most central but "publicity" and "representative power" are also extremely important in his account of the movement from Feudal society through the various bourgeois revolutions and the formation of liberal society to the "interventionism" of the welfare state. And, of course, the relationship between the terms "public" and "Private" is central to his argument.
As I said above, the title would be better as "transformations" because it moves through these various permutations. It is also deceptive for it to pretend its focus is solely on the "structural" level. For throughout he adopts a very nice dialectical understanding of the mutual constitution of various formations at both the structural and subject level. In fact, though the social structure is very important, he is very vehement about the importance of the stance of the individual and the state of mind it inspires. He is also very careful to speak to both of these levels and any in between throughout the process.
Though he has a much longer account of how this happened, he basically has a few important levels on which he stops to account for these changes, not really giving any determinant primacy ( so far as I can tell) to any one level. To start, he begins looking at the level of the absolutist state and its monarchical authority. The public at this point would be anyone not in the monarchy, all of the subjects of the kingdom (subject here being another pivotal term). the Private sphere as such was something that was left only to the monarch. This was not only because of the lack of the notion of private property or the inability of anyone other than the powerful to claim any private sphere. Power was assumed to be legitimate by some higher authority or simply based on the control of the state. PUBLICITY at this point was basically the REPRESENTATION of that power in a public forum. Likewise, representation was simply a matter of portraying this power BEFORE the people rather than FOR the people.
In a complex and decades long transformation, based largely on the expansion of the bourgeoisie--both in itself and across the globe via merchantilism--this gradually began to change. This change was not only based on the rough economics that most discussants stop with but had as much to do with more cultural and social factors. In terms of ideology, the bourgeois notions of the family and the rise of the practice of letter writing and the interiority of the individual. The rise of letters also aided in the distribution of news and information--especially in the very physical locales of the coffeehouse and the solon. The rise of the novel--which, incedentally, began in the European tradition in an epistolary form (this is my addition; might be wrong, but its what I remember, especially in the rise of the American Novel)--also inspired a sort of critical discussion about cultural affairs. Here it is important to note that it isn't so much the substance of these letters--whether in the form of newsletters or belles lettres--but the critical subjectivity of the interaction around them. In turn, this interaction is only made possible by the individuation of the new bourgeois family (this, he notes is also reflected in its architecture.)
They formed the public sphere of rational-critical debate in the world of
letters within which the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the
conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself
(51). [through an "audience oriented privacy]
The development of both this consciousness as well as the interactions that they helped to constitute in either the coffeehouses or in the salon led this newly formed public sphere to begin to demand more of power, namely the notion that this rational critical debate and the formation of a public consensus was the best way of establishing a general norm. Thus the idea of a "law" based on something other than absolutist decree was becoming more prominent.
A political consciousness developed in the public sphere of civil society which,
in oppostion to absolute soveriegnty articulated the concept of and demand for
general and abstract laws which ultimately came to assert itself (i.e. public
opinion) as the only legitimate source of this law. (54)
I find this a very important point because it makes clear the goal of this public sphere was precisely to have an effect on the way that power worked. Moreover, it was in this context that the notions of bourgeois liberalism were formed and thus all of our constitutional norms and forms of government are based on this notion of the way that civil society and the state should function. This is important because it is not only a problem of the transformation of the way that the state works, or the relationship between the state and civil society, but the interactions of civil society are paramount in and of themselves, interactions which are founded on a certain notion of the private individual and the preferred stance they should have. The media certainly play a role in this process as the dominant modes of publicity and the mediation between the spheres of civil society and the state, but the transformation is far from being only located at that interaction alone. This, perhaps, shows the way that Habermas is very much rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition which takes the psychological stance of the individual as a very important jumping off point.
In this case, Habermas focuses on what he calls the "ambivalence of the privatized individual" as both a Bourgeoisie (citizen, owner of goods) and a homme (one human being among others). The former was more related to the male realm of the public sphere, mainly in the political journalism and coffeehouse tradition in which they would debate as owners in the political realm concerning the regulation of their private sphere. Habermas readily admits that, though this was a more open dialogue than before women were traditionally (and perhaps even legally) excluded from this dicsussion. On the the other hand, women and even other non-property owners such as apprentices and servants, took part in the discussion and debate over the world of letters in salons etc. And, although Habermas says that these dual roles, were each equally important and not necessarily separate, this is certainly one of the places that he is roundly dismissed, especially by feminists.
It is also clearly based on a notion of class that excludes a large portion of the population, a contracition that Habermas highlights in section 11. In between, he looks at the development of the PS in various different contexts and points to the ways that civil society in Britain, France, and Germany insisted on both the publicity of the government and the legitimation of public authority and laws through some sort of deliberative process, often mediated by (oppositional) political journalism. Here he works up to the moment of the institution of the bourgeois consitutional state in its various contexts and its relationship to the understanding of the market economy, which basically limited the ability of the state have dominance over anyone without their consent.
Though it may not be accurate in historical terms (I'm not sure--it does seem to match the ideological history as I understand it but I'm not sure if that means it's necessarily false) I like his understanding of this process because it firmly places the agency of this change in the formation of legitimacy in the hands of the civil society. Unlike other theorists, like Foucault, who seem to make no distinction between the absolutist monarchy and the rising bourgeois except from the perspective of the style of legitimacy "power" uses under each regime. Habermas sees the uniqueness of the challenge provided by liberalism and eventually explains its "refeudalization" as the logical conclusion of its own philosophy and its attempt to overcome the inherently "contradictory institutionalization of the public sphere in the bourgeois constitutional state."
The contradiction is multifaceted, but it can roughly be summed up in the already mentioned ambivalence of the citizen/human individual of civil society and the presumption that the rational critical discussion of that civil society would be more legitimate than absolutist domination. This understanding of power, as Habermas tells it, was an extension of the belief in the self-regulating functions of market competition which assumed that no one would be able to enact any form of coercion or domination via the market. Leaving aside the faulty assumptions of this underpinning, the point was that, according to Habermas
The bourgeois idea of the law-based state, namely, the binding of al state
activity to a system of norms legitimated by public opinion (a system that had
no gaps, if possible), already aimed at abolishing the state as an instrument of
domination altogether. Acts of soveriengty were considered apocryphal per
se. [. . . .] The domination of the public, according to its own idea, was an
order in which domination itself was dissolved. (82)
The first problem is that there would have to be some form of power enacted via this public sphere to have an effect on the current system meaning that it would have some form of domination in that regard (82-83). But, "nowhere did the constitutional establishment of a public sphere in the political realm [. . . .] betray its chracter as an order of domination more than in its central article stating that all power came from the people"(84). This is, for Habermas, because there was obviously a large number of people who were disenfranchised in this process so that it wasn't really all of the people
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