Habermas begins his first important book-' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)- thus
This investigation endeavors to analyze the type "bourgeois public sphere" (bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit).
There has been a bourgeoise as long as there have been Cities containing merchants, skilled artisans, professionals & those of independent means. Whatever activities they were all eligible to participate in were public rather than private, professional or pertaining to a guild or corporation. Such sentiments as were affirmed or opinions as were commonly expressed in the course of such activities would be called the public opinion of the middling sort in that place. In Mauryan India, the Arthashastra tells us, spies employed by the State were instructed to monitor what people were saying in the bazaars & taverns- or, indeed, whispering behind closed doors.
In the late Middle Ages, in Europe, walled towns which were given charters-or 'liberties' (a specific geographic area or jurisdictional zone where royal authority was revoked and replaced by private control, often managed by a lord, bishop, or religious house)- had a distinctive middle class which sometimes challenged the feudal order. There were also City States- e.g. the Republics of Venice & Genoa- which played an important economic role. The Cahorsins & the Lombards were traders & bankers with international connections whom many abhorred for the sin of usury. The opinions of such groups were important as Princes needed to borrow money or raise taxes in order to fight wars or build luxurious palaces for themselves. The Reformation owed much to this rising class as well as to 'humanistic' (i.e. with a classical education) Knights of the poorer sort as well as to the plebian 'ministeriales' who had risen to a similar status through service to the State.
As such, the existence of bourgeois public opinion is independent of technology or the structure of the economy though its relative size is a function of both. If the opinion, or statistical distribution of opinions, it is the same for the bourgeoisie as the opinion, or distribution of opinions, of the population as a whole, it may be cheaper to monitor it- or, indeed, allow it to publish its own self-monitoring. However, if the views of this class diverge from that of the wider population, then it would be dangerous to take it as representative of 'public opinion'. It may be their opinions represent a sort of fashionable jaundice of the eye, or affectation of moral superiority, or outright bigotry.
Analysing public opinion is very useful to business enterprises, political parties & organs of government. Moreover, great strides in the Statistical sciences & vast improvements in the technology of data generation & analysis, have turned Market Research in the UK into a 19 billion pound industry directly generating 70,000 jobs with the wider research sector supporting up to 350,000 full-time jobs.
This is not a field where a stupid Kraut, like Habermas, who did a dissertation on Schelling, can contribute anything.
Its particular approach is required, to begin with, by the difficulties specific to an object whose complexity precludes exclusive reliance on the specialized methods of a single discipline.
The bourgeois or proletarian or power elite public sphere are objects for the study of Sociology. No other discipline is concerned with such matters.
Rather, the category "public sphere" must be investigated within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional science of "politics."
Particular political institutions may be part of the 'public sphere' at least so far as a particular class in concerned. But they are at best a 'subset'. The 'category' can't be investigated on the basis of a 'subset'. Why? A category acts like a very high-level or "supreme" intension. A set is the extension of an intension. Unless there is 'naturality' or 'unicity', no extension can tell us anything about the corresponding intension. Why? There is an arbitrary & 'multiply realisable' relationship between the intension & the extension.
When considered within the boundaries of a particular social-scientific discipline, this object disintegrates.
No. Sociology- both theoretical & applied- can put more more flesh on the notion of 'the public sphere' for various useful purposes. Obviously, if your purpose is to talk useless shite, you can say that any object whatsoever disintegrates on further analysis. Mummy says 'take the dog for a walk'. You say 'what is the boundary of the category 'dog'? Is it to do with saying 'woof woof'? I say woof woof. Rover, however, frequently does not say woof-woof. Indeed, the more I think about it, the very concept of 'dog' disintegrates.'
The problems that result from fusing aspects of sociology and economics, of constitutional law and political science, and of social and intellectual history are obvious:
They are already fused in the objects these disciplines study. Suppose we want to study the properties of of a particular drop of water. Chemistry, Physics, Biology supply us different types of information about it. We don't need to create a particular fusion of these Sciences for the purpose. Similarly in looking at the public sphere at any time or place we can separate out what is Economic, what is Political, what is Sociological, what is Psychological and so forth and get experts from those disciplines to analyse each aspect. This is like 'factorization'. Reality is a time series & the intuitive 'factors' we use to 'carve it up along its joints' are the fundamental concepts of specific disciplines. True, the actual factors may, unknown to us, not fit into the way we currently conceive that disciple.
given the present state of differentiation and specialization in the social sciences, scarcely anyone will be able to master several, let alone all, of these disciplines.
This may be true of Medicine. But this does not mean a patient with a complex diagnosis can't be helped by different specialists. No doubt, a particular physician might be in charge of coordination or sequencing of treatments.
The other peculiarity of our method results from the necessity of having to proceed at once sociologically and historically.
Which is what Social Historians do.
We conceive bourgeois public sphere as a category that is typical of an epoch.
Because we have shit for brains. The fact is 'bourgeois public sphere' is not well defined. It has no unique definition. It has no 'categoricity'.
It cannot be abstracted from the unique developmental history of that "civil society" (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) originating in the European High Middle Ages;
Sure it can. Since there was no Europe wide koinōnía politikḗ, we see a whole bunch of developmental histories because the thing was essentially 'multiply realisable'.
nor can it be transferred, idealtypically generalized, to any number of historical situations that represent formally similar constellations.
Sez who?
Just as we try to show, for instance, that one can properly speak of public opinion in a precise sense only with regard to late-seventeenth-century Great Britain
because there had been a Civil War and lots of crazy ideological shit going down. The feeling was that jaw-jaw was better than war-war. Still, if the Glorious Revolution hadn't been bloodless, the opinion of the public would have been that opinions were for the fucking birds. The hope was that folk would substitute party politics for theological strife & pamphleteers would abandon brimstone & hell-fire for urbane raillery & economic advantage.
Put simply, 'public opinion' was more important when the King's head was being cut off. Ideologies at that time were more extreme. By contrast, the 'Glorious Revolution' was a tame affair. A phlegmatic Dutch Protestant replaced a bigoted Scottish Catholic. The opinions of the clergy (of the Established Church) played a big part in this.
and eighteenth-century France,
who didn't get that the only type of Revolution that is Glorious is one which ends with nobody giving a fuck about 'glorie' because they are too busy getting rich.
we treat public sphere in general as a historical category.
A professional historian may do so. But Habermas was no such thing.
In this respect our procedure is distinguished a limine from the approach of formal sociology whose advanced state nowadays is represented by so-called structural-functional theory.
There can be a dynamic theory of this sort. A limine, there is no fucking distinction.
The sociological investigation of historical trends proceeds on a level of generality at which unique processes and events can only be cited as examples—that is, as cases that can be interpreted as instances of a more general social development.
The same is true of any other sort of categorical investigation. Dirk Gently, the psychic Detective, is above that sort of thing. But he is fictional.
This sociological procedure differs from the practice of historiography
which does use categories which are sociological more particularly if it is 'Social History'.
strictly speaking in that it seems less bound to the specifics of the historical material, yet it observes its own equally strict criteria for the structural analysis of the interdependencies at the level of society as a whole.
Sociology is more nomothetic. History is more ideographic. Economics is like Sociology. Geography is like History. But, what Habermas has is 'a theory of History' which is either Marxian- i.e. economic- or moonshine.
After these two methodological preliminaries, we would also like to record a reservation pertaining to the subject matter itself. Our investigation is limited to the structure and function of the liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere,
But that liberal model was itself produced by the bourgeois public sphere! Its structure & function is whatever the bourgeois public sphere wanted it to be! I produce a turd our of my asshole. Investigating the structure and function of my turd tells you only about turds- not me. The fact is my turd is similar to that of other people with a similar age, diet & constitution. Thus 'the liberal model' has the same structure & function as the 'Conservative model' or 'theological model of the 'sphere' in question.
to its emergence and transformation.
The liberal model wasn't transformed anymore than my turds are transformed over the course of time. There are different turds or models at different times.
Thus it refers to those features of a historical constellation that attained dominance
William of Orange? That's who attained dominance after the Glorious Revolution. I suppose, since it was by virtue of Mary's claim to the throne, that William gained power, we could say 'William & Mary' were a 'constellation'.
and leaves aside the plebeian public sphere
Which was the same as the bourgeois public sphere for a 'pleb' who made enough money. But this varied from place to place.
as a variant that in a sense was suppressed in the historical process.
Being poor doesn't mean you are suppressed. It just means you don't get to move in opulent circles.
In the stage of the French Revolution associated with Robespierre, for just one moment, a public sphere stripped of its literary garb began to function
There were 'Reigns of Terror' all over the place. What mattered was that power would go to those able and willing to use canons to slaughter nutters who thought 'the public sphere' meant shit.
—its subject was no longer the "educated strata" but the uneducated "people."
Habermas believed he was 'educated'. He wasn't. He was a coprophagous cretin. Productive people ran away from France when it did stupid shit. They returned when it decided to make itself richer, more powerful & more secure. Sadly, Napoleon overreached- probably because he was a literary cove.
Yet even this plebeian public sphere, whose continued but submerged existence manifested itself in the Chartist Movement
Not submerged at all. It was above ground but a bit silly. As Napier said to the 'Physical Force' Chartists- it's the guys with the canons who have the physical force.
and especially in the anarchist traditions of the workers' movement on the continent, remains oriented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere.
This is paranoid Marxist shite about how everybody, except me & my cat, is selling out to the fucking bourgeoisie.
In the perspective of intellectual history it was, like the latter, a child of the eighteenth century.
as opposed to the cousin of the 30th Century.
Precisely for this reason it must be strictly distinguished from the plebiscitary-acclamatory form of regimented public sphere characterizing dictatorships in highly developed industrial societies.
None have any such thing. Representative Democracy is the way to go. POTUS isn't directly elected. There is an Electoral College.
Backward shitholes with lots of peasant proprietors may have 'Caesarean Presidents'- like Napoleon III. Incidentally, more than half of the German population was rural or semi-rural when Hitler came to power. By our standards, Germany wasn't 'highly developed'. It was 'emerging' as a developed industrial state.
Formally they have certain traits in common; but each differs in its own way from the literary character of a public sphere constituted by private people putting reason to use
Which they have always done- unless they teach worthless shite like Habermas.
—one is illiterate, the other, after a fashion, post-literary.
Nonsense! Anything whatsoever can be put into writing, provided it can be put into words.
The similarity with certain aspects of plebiscitary form cannot conceal the fact that these two variants of the public sphere of bourgeois society (which in the context of the present investigation will be equally neglected) have also been charged with different political functions, each at a distinct stage of social development.
What does 'charged with a political function mean'? A merely subjective or self-serving ascription. The billionaire might say that God has created the rich for the special purpose of ensuring that the working class does not bite off its own head while vigorously fisting itself. Habermas says he will 'neglect' that sort of claim- which, I must say, is very sensible of him.
What isn't sensible is what he is doing in this book- viz.
Our investigation presents a stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere and of their transformation in the social-welfare state
This picture had already been painted umpteen times by those same liberal elements. Habermas could add no value here because he was relatively ignorant of English & French history.
Introduction: Preliminary Demarcation of a Type of Bourgeois Public Sphere 1 The Initial Question The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings.
So does the usage of the word 'usage' or the word 'word' or the word 'betrays' or the word 'multiplicity' etc.
Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam
only in a clouded mind. Otherwise there are 'bright line' distinctions, known to the law, between what is public & private. Consider the case of a Housing Trust which fulfils a 'public purpose' as stipulated by law. It isn't publicly owned but is bound by the same rules as a publicly owned body discharging the same function.
Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.
The Courts exist so as to clear up any confusion.
Not just ordinary language (especially as it bears the imprint of bureaucratic and mass media jargon) but also the sciences—particularly jurisprudence, political science, and sociology—do not seem capable of replacing traditional categories like "public" and "private," "public sphere," and "public opinion," with more precise terms.
They do so well enough for any practical purpose. What appears to be the case to a shithead who studies shit, is not in fact the case.
Ironically, this dilemma has first of all bedeviled the very discipline that explicitly makes public opinion its subject matter.
That discipline is Market Research. It isn't bedevilled by anything save faulty Statistical methodology.
With the application of empirical techniques, the object that public-opinion research was to apprehend has dissolved into something elusive;
No. Everything has become more and more concrete & accessible- albeit by more sophisticated means- e.g. Consumer confidence indices incorporating real time data streams.
nevertheless sociology has refused to abandon altogether these categories; it continues to study public opinion.
Academic Sociology may have shat the bed but Market Research is a thriving industry.
We call events and occasions "public" when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs—as when we speak of public places or public houses.
In English English, a public house is a pub- i.e. a private establishment for the sale and consumption of alcohol. The term 'publican' means one who gathers or pays taxes- which is what the owner of the 'pub' did at a time when beer might be brewed on the premises & the 'malt tax' payable upon it was collected at the point of sale.
The English also make a distinction between elite 'Public Schools' and often equally selective 'Private Schools' (both of which are wholly independent of the Government) for historical reasons.
But as in the expression "public building," the term need not refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have to be open to public traffic. "Public buildings" simply house state institutions and as such are "public." The state is the "public authority."
But a private organization fulfilling the same objective may be classed as such for legal purposes.
It owes this attribute to its task of promoting the public or common welfare of its rightful members.
Not necessarily. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions all establishments may be given this task under particular circumstances.
The word has yet another meaning when one speaks of a "public (official] reception"; on such occasions a powerful display of representation is staged whose "publicity" contains an element of public recognition.
A government body may do 'public relations' just as well as a private enterprise.
There is a shift in meaning again
No. There is a different meaning
when we say that someone has made a name for himself, has a public reputation.
i.e. his fame extends to the general public.
The notion of such personal prestige or renown originated in epochs other than that of "polite society."
No. It was coeval with it. There could be a private sort of fame- limited to the cognoscenti- & there was the general, or popular, type of celebrity.
None of these usages, however, have much affinity with the meaning most commonly associated with the category—expressions like "public opinion," an "outraged" or "informed public," "publicity," "publish," and "publicize."
All do. An earlier age may have spoken of the mob or the masses or the great unwashed.
The subject of this publicity is the public as carrier of public opinion; its function as a critical judge is precisely what makes the public character of proceedings—in court, for instance—meaningful.
No. It is irrelevant. If both parties to a suit agree, there is generally some way to ensure that what goes on the public record is very limited indeed. Additionally, in certain matters, Courts are authorised to proceed 'in camera'.
What makes court proceedings meaningful is judgments which cause people to go to jail or to forfeit significant sums of money. At one time 'public proceeding' was an aspect of 'legitimacy'- i.e. was a legal requirement based on customary practice. But that was long ago.
In the realm of the mass media, of course, publicity has changed its meaning.
No. Publicity & privacy retain their legal meaning.
Originally a function of public opinion, it has become an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion:
No. Publicity is something enterprises spend money on for their own purposes. We may also speak of 'bad publicity'- i.e. information which shows you in a bad light which is being widely disseminated- & the need to hire a PR firm to improve your image.
public relations and efforts recently baptized "publicity work" are aimed at producing such publicity.
The thing had always existed. What Habermas thought was 'public discourse' was actually crude propaganda of, in the England of Swift & Defoe, an entertaining enough type. Addison's 'the Campaign', however, might be considered 'Public Relations'.
The public sphere itself appears as a specific domain—the public domain versus the private.
Maybe in Germany. Not in England. The thing is inchoate though it may be justiciable.
Sometimes the public appears simply as that sector of public opinion that happens to be opposed to the authorities.
There speaks the Kraut! The public is opposed to somethings which the Government is obliged to do. That doesn't mean it is opposed to the Government itself.
Depending on the circumstances, either the organs of the state or the media, like the press, which provide communication among members of the public, may be counted as "public organs."
No. There is a clear distinction in law between private enterprises and public bodies. However a private enterprise may, if is delegated to discharge a public function, come under public law but only with respect to that activity.
A social-historical analysis of the syndrome of meanings possessed by "public" and "publicity" could uncover the essential sociological characteristics of the various historical language strata.
Why bother? They are obvious enough.
The first etymological reference to the public sphere is quite revealing. In German the noun Öffentlichheit was formed from the older adjective öffentlich during the eighteenth century, in analogy to "publicité" and "publicity"; by the close of the century the word was still so little used that Heynatz could consider it objectionable.
The word public is connected to 'res publica' & the notion of citizenship in a Republic. But the conqueror, or slave-owner, may 'openly' kill or rape or torture particular people so as to terrify his subjects. He may also sodomize them in private or, indeed, demand anal pleasuring from a well hung slave. This has nothing to do with the public sphere. No doubt, German philologists felt a bit ashamed of the backwardness of their country. Charles V is supposed to have said "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." However, German's status rose & by the 1780s, it had replaced Latin as the official language of the Holy Roman Empire.
If the public sphere did not require a name of its own before this period, we may assume that this sphere first emerged and took on its function only at that time, at least in Germany.
No we may not unless we are as stupid as shit. The official language of the Holy Roman Empire was Latin. The term res publica was used for the 'public sphere'. The Empire itself was seen as a 'composite state" (res publica composita) though earlier it was felt to be a "Christian commonwealth" (res publica Christiana).
It was specifically a part of "civil society,"
Roman law is also called Civil law.
which at the same time established itself as the realm of commodity exchange and social labor governed by its own laws.
No. There was a separate 'Law Merchant' which was not 'positive' (i.e. a King's command) but which might operate in 'Liberties'. A separate but related type of Law was established by Mercantile networks- e.g. the Lubeck law of the Hanseatic League.
Notions concerning what is "public" and what is not—that is, what is "private"—however, can be traced much further back into the past.
There was great continuity between Greek & Roman law & the Civil law jurisdictions. But there were also Teutonic & other sources of customary or 'common' law.
We are dealing here with categories of Greek origin transmitted to us bearing a Roman stamp. In the fully developed Greek city-state the sphere of the polis, which was common (koine) to the free citizens, was strictly separated from the sphere of the oikos;
Nonsense! Greek houses, like Indian or Iranian or Arab houses, had a 'public' (koinon) area where most people were welcomed to take shelter & receive hospitality, and a 'private' (idiom) area (kitchen, women's quarters, etc).
in the sphere of the oikos, each individual is in his own realm (idia).
No. Oikeiosis means that there is an overlap such that though some matters are personal & private, others are not.
The public life, bios politikos, went on in the market place (agora),
it also went on in private drinking parties (e.g. the famous Symposium featuring Socrates). Hannah Arendt had shit for brains. She didn't get that if Socrates was 'corrupting youth' behind closed doors he didn't gain an immunity from prosecution.
but of course this did not mean that it occurred necessarily only in this specific locale. The public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis),
No. There were some deliberative processes required by law or convention. However, they couldn't constitute shit. A public sphere exists only if those involved can preserve it from enemies or wild animals or bankruptcy.
which could also assume the forms of consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis), be it the waging of war or competition in athletic games. (Strangers were often called upon to legislate, which was not properly one of the public tasks.)
Perhaps the translation is inaccurate. Otherwise, the man who wrote the above is an cretin.
The political order, as is well known, rested on a patrimonial slave economy.
No. The economy may have done so but the political order rested on the ability of the citizens to defeat or come to terms with aggressors.
The citizens were thus set free from productive labor;
Some were, some weren't. But, even before there was much slavery, there had been a campaigning season when farmers could participate in military campaigns. In Athens, most 'thetes' worked on their land or did wage labour. They may have been the majority in the time of Pericles. Some may have also owned slaves.
it was, however, their private autonomy "as masters of households on which their participation in public life depended.
No. You just had to be a true born citizen who had completed military training. It didn't matter if you lived with Mum & Dad.
The private sphere was attached to the house not by name only.
Names don't matter. Stuff is private to me if I keep killing anyone who disputes it.
Movable wealth and control over labor power were no more substitutes for being the master of a household and of a family than, conversely, poverty and a lack of slaves would in themselves prevent admission to the polis.
But an 18 year old living with Mum & Dad could be a citizen. Being master of a household was not a criteria.
Exile, expropriation, and the destruction of the house amounted to one and the same thing.
No. They were different things. Exile might be temporary. Expropriation might not involve loss of civil rights. Houses get destroyed all the time. They don't change your legal status.
Status in the polis was therefore based upon status as the unlimited master of an oikos.
Fuck off! The son had equal status with the father in the public sphere once he had completed military training. Only in the private sphere did the father as 'kurios' have a superior right.
Xenophon's Ischomachus gives a realistic picture of the life of the gentry. The wife, as much as the husband, was the manager & equal beneficiary of the property. But, such has it always been. Men can't have babies but they can be very useful to Mummies. Gender dimorphism fades away in any managerial or knowledge based role or activity.
The reproduction of life, the labor of the slaves, and the service of the women went on under the aegis of the master's domination;
or the mistress's. True, in Athens she might need a notional male Guardian (kyrios). Not so in Sparta. In practice, Mums or widowed elder sisters looked after the agricultural estate while young men tried to get ahead in one of the professions in the big City. There are still some matrilocal communities in Greece. The assumption that the ancient Greeks were exclusively patriarchal seems unlikely- more particularly for island communities.
birth and death took place in its shadow;
as it did all over the world till about a ninety years ago when people started going to maternity wards in hospitals. The invention of antibiotics was the game changer.
and the realm of necessity and transitoriness remained immersed in the obscurity of the private sphere.
Fuck off! Necessity & transitoriness was a big feature of the public sphere in cities subject to siege & civil strife. People living in rural backwaters were much less affected. The question we may well ask is why Macedon, where women played a much bigger role in 'the public sphere', conquered not just the Hellenic but also the Iranian & Egyptian oikumene.
In contrast to it stood, in Greek self-interpretation,
which was scarcely univocal
the public sphere as a realm of freedom and permanence.
Was Habermas wholly illiterate? Did he really not know that many a Polis was invaded & its citizens killed or enslaved? Alternatively, some political convulsion would lead to a purge. That's why it was safer to settle in Persian or Macedonian territory. The public sphere can too easily turn into not just a public nuisance but a public menace. Liberalism is actually about checks & balances on that shite. Stupid German pedants never understood this. Ordinary Germans did. It is simply untrue to say Germans are different from Anglo-Saxons. But, even now, they are playing catch-up. Their indigenous 'ideologies' were backwardness, not to say retardation, incarnate. Hopefully Habermas or Hoppe or whoever are the last of its Neanderthals.
Only in the light of the public sphere did that which existed become revealed,
There was no such fucking light. That which existed became revealed through wholly private cogitation or, at a later point, entrepreneurial Academies & Lyceums.
did everything become visible to all. In the discussion among citizens
which occurred in ancient tribal republics or City States three thousand years ago
issues were made 'topical and took on shape.
There were such discussions even in despotic Kingdoms. An absolute monarch might invite merchants or sailors or other such people with expert knowledge to discuss matters before him & his ministers. This is because if he relies on just one such expert, he may not get the whole picture. If there is a lively discussion, you get a more rounded picture. In a sense, the 'enlightened despot'- a Fredrick or Catherine- might permit more free discussion for particular purposes than a constitutional monarch who relies only on the opinions of the leader of the majority party.
In the competition among equals the best excelled and gained their essence
sadly, it was more likely that the windbag or the ranter gained pre-eminence
—the immortality of fame. Just as the wants of life and the procurement of its necessities were shamefully hidden inside the oikos,
they weren't. Householders went to the market and might riot if the price of bread was too high.
so the polis provided an open field for honorable distinction:
An absolute monarchy or Empire might have an even more firmly established 'cursus honorum'- or circle of official appointments for sprigs of the Aristocracy. Indeed, in Russia & China, failure to serve the State led to a degradation of rank for the Nobility. Such service was also the route for advancement into the Aristocracy for commoners with uncommon talent.
citizens indeed interacted as equals with equals (homoioi),
they might do, or they might not. A rigid caste based society nevertheless might have open discussion in Councils of State.
but each did his best to excel (aristoiein).
The 'tall poppy' falls quicker to the scythe. It is best to be cautious and balanced in one's judgments. Otherwise, you attract envy & enmity.
The virtues, whose catalogue was codified by Aristotle,
a pedant. His most famous pupil didn't heed his advise to treat barbarians differently from Greeks. Indeed, he married an Iranian Princess.
were ones whose test lies in the public sphere and there alone receive recognition. Since the Renaissance this model of the Hellenic public sphere, as handed down to us in the stylized form of Greek self-interpretation, has shared with everything else considered "classical" a peculiarly normative power.
Cicero was important. Many could read Latin. Few Greek. But Humanists had to accept that Caesar, not Cicero, prevailed. In seventeenth century England, it was the Common Law tradition- not some Greek or Latin shite- which became the foundation of opposition to Stuart absolutism. James I was called the 'wisest fool in Christendom' in that he knew Latin & Greek. He had to yield to 'the artificial reason' of the Common Law as represented by Lord Coke. In England, even the King can't hang a thief caught in the act. There has to be due process of law.
America owes much to Coke's 'Institutes'. It went in the direction of Pym & Hampden. Sadly, the English polity preferred that of Wentworth.
Not the social formation at its base but the ideological template itself has preserved continuity over the centuries—on the level of intellectual history.
Not in England. The Common Law prevailed. Parliament stood upon its traditional rights. The question was whether the Crown could raise sufficient funds by some other means. The answer was no. There could be 'No taxation without Representation' as the American rebels would later affirm. Anglo-Saxons have little use for 'ideology'. What matters is the Law which develops organically. Bentham may have decried 'dog's law'. After his Russian sojourn (it was there that his brother built the Panopticon) he expressed disgust with England's legal system. Why can't we have codification of a rational sort? Is it merely a case of the vested interests of the lawyers in maintaining a medieval Justice system? Over the course of the nineteenth century, there was considerable reform. Doctors Commons (for Canon Law) was dissolved in 1857. King's Equity & Common pleas were merged some 20 years later. Legislation did codify many matters but the creative power of 'Judge made law' wasn't curbed. Why? It was too useful. It may be that the pendulum has swung too far away from 'doctrine of political question'. Europe may restore the supremacy of the Legislature even if it means scrapping Human Rights & other Treaty based law.
To begin with, throughout the Middle Ages the categories of the public and the private and of the public sphere understood as res publico were passed on in the definitions of Roman law.
Or not. Scotland has a 'mixed' system with more emphasis on Roman Law. England & Wales have no truck with it. But there is convergence for practical purposes. That is all that matters. The genealogy of concepts may be an engrossing subject for pedants but it has no practical application.
Of course, they found a renewed application meaningful in the technical, legal sense only with the rise of the modern state and of that sphere of civil society separated from it.
There was no 'application'. A pedant might say 'Aha! What is happening looks like the application of some shite which went down in ancient Rome 2000 years ago!' But someone else might say 'No! This is like what happened in Episode 3, Season 7, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. The latter is more likely to be right. Everybody likes Buffy. Few give a shit about Justinian.
They served the political self-interpretation as well as the legal institutionalization of a public sphere that was bourgeois in a specific sense.
The specific sense being that of wanting lower taxes and higher incomes. The bourgeoisie may pretend to care about Cicero. What really gets its motor running is money.
Meanwhile, however, for about a century the social foundations of this sphere have been caught up in a process of decomposition.
In Germany- perhaps. Not America. Still, it is true, Adenauer- who was in power when Habermas wrote this- looked pretty decrepit. He was as bourgeois as it was possible to be & it was he who had prevailed over the Nazis & the Commies. Some think he could have become Chancellor in 1926 if only he hadn't taken such a rooted dislike to Stresemann. The truth is he was suspicious of 'Prussianism' & would have preferred the Rhineland to be separated from it. That is why he rejected the 1952 'Stalin note' offering re-unification on the basis of neutrality (as would happen in the case of Austria). Incidentally, Menachem Begin tried to kill him but this was kept secret at that time.
Tendencies pointing to the collapse of the public sphere are unmistakable,
There was a scandal in 1962 when the police arrested some journalists who had written an article exposing weaknesses in the German army. There was a widespread feeling that the 86 year old Adenauer was senile & out of touch with the generation which came of age after the War. For example he said Brandt was ineligible for political office because he was illegitimate!
for while its scope is expanding impressively, its function has become progressively insignificant.
Its function was to determine who would win elections. Perhaps, Habermas meant that the CDU would rule the roost come what may. As a matter of fact, the student movement was successful in putting Brandt in office by the end of the decade.
Still, publicity continues to be an organizational principle of our political order. It is apparently more and other than a mere scrap of liberal ideology that a social democracy could discard without harm. If we are sucicessful in gaining a historical understanding of the structures of this complex that today, confusedly enough, we subsume under the heading "public sphere," we can hope to attain thereby not only a sociological clarification of the concept but a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories.
In other words, Habermas wasn't concerned with German politics or, indeed, politics of any sort. He was interested only in 'sociological clarification' of some silly concept or the other. But this only mattered to pedants teaching that shite.
Remarks on the Type of Representative Publicness During the Middle Ages in Europe the contrast drawn in Roman law between publicus and privatus was familiar but had no standard usage.
In Germany, there was a distinction between the free (Freie) and unfree (Unfreie or serfs) defined in terms of legal capacity, mobility, and land ownership. However, the notion that 'city air makes you free' became a legal concept. However, in rural areas, serfdom only ended towards the end of the eighteenth & beginning of the nineteenth century. By contrast, it had ended in England some three centuries earlier.
The precarious attempt to apply it to the legal conditions of the feudal system of domination based on fiefs and manorial authority (Grundherrschaft) unintentionally provides evidence that an opposition between the public and private spheres on the ancient (or the modern) model did not exist.
The distinction did exist. Some people had the absolute right to marry as it was a private matter for themselves. Others had to get permission & pay a fee.
Here too an economic organization of social labor caused all relations of domination to be centered in the lord's household.
No. The Lord might live far away. Feudal dues- including merchet or ungenossame Ehe (marriage fees)- were collected by an agent.
Nevertheless, the feudal lord's position within the process of production was not comparable to the "private" authority of the oikodespotes or of the pater families.
It might be, if he lived on his ancestral estate & chose to concern himself with the private lives of his serfs & liegemen.
While manorial authority (and its derivative, feudalism) as the quintessence of all lordly particular rights might be conceived of as a jurisdictio, it could not be fitted readily into the contrast between private dominion (dominium) and public autonomy (imperium).
This can be easily done by analysing it in terms of Hohfeldian incidents. Free people had 'immunities' with respect to marriage & mobility. Serfs did not.
There were lower and higher "sovereignties," eminent and less eminent prerogatives; but there was no status that in terms of private law defined in some fashion the capacity in which private people could step forward into a public sphere.
Positive law- i.e. the King's command- could change the status of a serf promoting him to the rank of 'ministeriales' & then, perhaps, even into the lower ranks of the nobility.
In Germany manorial authority, fully developed in the High Middle Ages, was transformed into private landed property only in the eighteenth century as part of the liberation of the peasants and the clearing of land holdings from feudal obligations.
Wealthy merchants were buying 'allodial' land even in the 15th century. The law had always provided workarounds in this respect.
The domestic authority of the head of a household is not the same as private dominion,
(ownership)
whether in the sense of classical law or in that of modern civil law.
Hausvatergewalt, was
extensively recognized by law in Germany. This authority, which granted the male head of household legal, financial, and disciplinary power over his wife, children, and servants, was formally entrenched in German law until deep into the 20th century. However, having authority over somebody doesn't mean you own them & can sell them to another. A wife or a son is not a slave.
When the latter's categories were transferred to social conditions providing no basis for division between the public sphere and the private domain, difficulties arose:
All 'social conditions' have a basis for this division. What I do in the toilet is private. You don't get to watch me take a dump even if you are my boss.
If we think of the land as the public sphere,
we ignore the fact that private property in land exists. Even if it doesn't, some land may be fenced off for military or other purposes & unauthorised people who try to access it may be shot if they try to enter it.
then the house and the authority exercised by its master must simply be considered a public authority of the second order:
No. We say there is a Hohfeldian immunity for the exercise of authority. We don't say that authority is being exercised on behalf of some higher authority. Consider the 'right' of self defence. In a 'stand your ground' State this may permit you to shoot an intruder. But you aren't exercising a delegated authority (unless you have been 'deputized' for that purpose). You have an immunity provided you acted in good faith. This is a justiciable matter.
it is certainly private in relation to that of the land to which it is subordinated, but surely in a sense very different from how the term is understood in modern private law. Thus it seems quite intelligible to me that "private'' and "public" powers are so fused together into an indivisible unity that both are emanations from a single unified authority, that they are inseparable from the land and can be treated like legitimate private rights.
German jurists know Hohfeld's work (Hohfeld'sche Grundbegriffe) and use it to clarify matters in theoretical discourse.
It should be noted, however, that the tradition of ancient Germanic law, through the categories "gemeinlich" and "sunderlich," "common" and "particular," did generate a contrast that corresponded somewhat to the classical one between "publicus" and "privatus."
Rome gave citizenship to conquered tribes & thus its legal code did not track differences in tribal origin or customary law. Germany evolved differently but adopted Roman law & the Latin language as it grew in affluence. However, in rural areas, older traditions persisted till the nineteenth century.
That contrast referred to communal elements to the extent to which they survived under .the feudal conditions of production.
Germany was slow to take off industrially and such conditions persisted into the first half of the nineteenth century. It must be said, Guilds often clung on to obsolete practices & regulations. Prior to the March 1848 Revolution, pauperism was increasing. This Vormärz period (pre-March) was the background to which Marx & Engels were responding with their Communist Manifesto.
The commons was public, publica-, for common use there was public access to the fountain and market square—loci communes, loci publici.
The suggestio falsi here is that there was a Golden Age when all property was held in common. The truth is the public fountain was helpful to the market square which in turn meant more money for the 'Lord of the Manor' who received fees from the stall-holders there. There aint no such thing as a free lunch.
The "particular" stood opposed to this "common," which etymologically is related to the common or public welfare (common wealth, public wealth). This specific meaning of "private" as "particular" reverberates in today's equation of special interests with private interests.
It also reverberated with the charge that big Corporations had backed militarism & two World Wars so as to get yet richer. Later, the Vietnam War would be seen as a gift the American military-industrial complex gave itself simply to boost profits.
Yet one should note that within the framework of feudalism the particular also included those who possessed special rights, that is, those with immunities and privileges. In this respect the particular (i.e., what stood apart), the exception through every sort of exemption, was the core of the feudal regime and hence of the realm that was "public."
The core of the feudal regime was bands of warriors who might loot wealthy towns or Abbeys. The solution was to turn the 'robber baron' into a 'stationary bandit' who could supply knights to the Emperor in case of an invasion or insurrection.
Habermas does not mention the role of the Church and its military orders- like the Teutonic Knights- and the effects of the wars of religion in the seventeenth century.
The original parallelism of Germanic and Roman legal categories was reversed as soon as they were absorbed by feudalism—the common man became the private man.
A commoner might be raised to the nobility.
A linguistic reminder of this relationship is the use of "private" in the sense of "common" soldier—the ordinary man without rank and without the particularity of a special power to command interpreted as "public."
A serf could not enrol in the Army without the permission of his Lord.
In medieval documents "lordly" and "publicus" were used synonymously; publicare meant to claim for the lord.
In medieval German law, publicare (Latin for "to make public" or "publish") generally meant the formal, official announcement of a legal act, sentence, or new rule to the community. It was crucial for establishing the validity of transactions, such as property transfers or court rulings, by bringing them into the public sphere to ensure transparency and community witness. Such documents carried Royal authority (albeit delegated).
The ambivalence in the meaning of "gemein" (common) as "communal," that is, (publicly) accessible to all and "ordinary," that is, without special right (namely, lordly prerogative) and without official rank in general still reflects the integration of elements of communal (genossenschaftlich) organization into a social structure based on manorial authority.
The opposite was equally likely. Communal organizations appealed to a notional 'manorial authority'. Thus, to this day, in England, you can buy yourself the title of 'Lord of the Manor' in return for which you receive some small token payment from the stall-holders at the village fair.
Sociologically, that is to say by reference to institutional criteria,
e.g. whether the City of Cologne was subject to its Bishop or whether they were free to pursue the objectives its own people wanted.
a public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages.
It can in the case of Cologne. Look at the sequence of events
1) The 1074 Uprising: Following an incident where Archbishop Anno II confiscated a ship to honour a guest, the citizens of Cologne rose against him, marking an early, though quickly suppressed, display of collective urban self-confidence and opposition.
2) The Battle of Worringen (1288): After decades of mounting conflict over civic rights and taxation, the citizens of Cologne allied with the Duke of Brabant and defeated the forces of Archbishop Siegfried of Westerburg. This decisive battle broke the secular power of the archbishop, resulting in his capture and forcing him to recognize the political independence of the city.
Establishment as a Free Imperial City: Following the Battle of Worringen, the archbishops were forced to move their residence from the city of Cologne to Bonn.
3) Legal Arbitration (1258): The "Great Arbitration" by Albertus Magnus, though often ignored by bishops, provided legal standing to the city's patricians to govern themselves and manage their own judicial system, restricting the archbishop's authority to mainly religious matters.
4) In 1475, the city was officially recognized as a Free Imperial City, which placed it directly under the authority of the Emperor and removed it from the secular control of the archbishop.
5) The Cologne War (1583–1588): When Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg converted to Calvinism and tried to turn the electorate into a secular dynasty, the Cathedral Chapter and Catholic factions—supported by Bavarian troops—deposed him, showing the chapter's influence over the secular power of the bishop. That is why Adenauer's Cologne remained Catholic despite Bismarck's 'Kulturkampf'.
Clearly, Cologne had a 'public sphere' for a thousand years. It prevailed over the Church over five hundred years ago.
Nevertheless it was no accident that the attributes of lordship, such as the ducal seal, were called "public"; not by accident did the English king enjoy "publicness"
Of the 8 English Kings killed between 946 & 1649, only one was publicly beheaded. The others met their deaths under obscure circumstances. No doubt, Charles I was happy he enjoyed 'publicness' in death.
—for lordship was something publicly represented. This publicness (or publicity) of representation was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere; rather, it was something like a status attribute, if this term may be permitted.
Habermas is responding to some stupid shit about the 'King's two bodies' written by some other stupid German pedant.
In itself the status of manorial lord, on whatever level, was neutral in relation to the criteria of "public" and "private"; but its incumbent represented it publicly. He displayed himself, presented himself as an embodiment of some sort of "higher" power.
So did the Bishop. As for the Pope, don't get me started, mate.
The concept of representation in this sense has been preserved down to the most recent constitutional doctrine, according to which representation can "occur only in public . . . there is no representation that would be a 'private' matter."
Such is not the Anglo-Saxon view. The American Constitution's Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, distinguishes between public rights (those involving the government) and private rights (disputes between individuals). A public official retains the right to private legal counsel & representation. Equally, a public action- e.g. granting of a pardon to a friend or relative- may be a 'private matter' in that it is the exercise of a plenary power which may not be justiciable.
For representation pretended to make something invisible visible through the public presence of the person of the lord:
the Eucharist?
". . . something that has no life, that is inferior, worthless, or mean, is not representable.
Sure its is. Display the corpses of criminals on the gibbet for all to see. Charge them money or at least sell them hotdogs while they feast their eyes.
It lacks the exalted sort of being suitable to be elevated into public status, that is, into existence. Words like excellence, highness, majesty, fame, dignity, and honor seek to characterize this peculiarity of a being that is capable of representation."
Or incapable of it. The Jews & the Muslims don't think God is representable. But they talk about Him all the time.
Representation in the sense in which the members of a national assembly represent a nation or a lawyer represents his clients had nothing to do with this publicity of representation inseparable from the lord's concrete existence, that, as an "aura," surrounded and endowed his authority.
Nonsense! There are 'King's Consuls' ('silks') earning big bucks in the higher Courts of England. The Lord Chancellor has some pretty nifty robes & such like.
When the territorial ruler convened about him ecclesiastical and wordly lords, knights, prelates, and cities (or as in the German Empire until 1806 when the Emperor invited the princes and bishops, Imperial counts, Imperial towns, and abbots to the Imperial Diet), this was not a matter of an assembly of delegates that was someone else's representative.
Yes it was. George III was the Elector of Hanover. He didn't show up to the Diet. He sent a representative as did the Elector of Brandenburg. Also, the entire free City of Cologne didn't show up. It sent a representative.
Habermas is pretending that there was a Golden Age when Kings went around the place curing 'King's Evil' by touching the afflicted. When the Emperor held a Diet, all the Electors turned up. Meanwhile the land was held in common. The bourgeoisie was forbidden to practice usury or to use the printing press to affect 'public opinion'. Wives & children were sternly rebuked by their Lord & Master if they took up masturbation or Marxism or other such vice.
As long as the prince and the estates of his realm "were" the country and not just its representatives, they could represent it in a specific sense.
Very true. When Gloriana pissed herself, rain fell upon England. Sadly, when the Kaiser farted in 1914, there were 100,000 German poison gas casualties.
They represented their lordship not for but "before" the people.
Come to think of it, the Sun King did shit in open court. The guy who wiped his bum- the "Porte-coton"- was a senior nobleman. Apparently, Versailles was not well provided with toilets. Everybody was doing their business behind some bush or other.
The staging of the publicity involved in representation was
limited to the Court. The King didn't want everybody to watch him shit. It was sufficient that noblemen spent their time wiping his bum rather than rebelling against him.
wedded to personal attributes such as insignia (badges and arms), dress (clothing and coiffure), demeanor (form of greeting and poise) and rhetoric (form of address and formal discourse in general)—in a word, to a strict code of "noble" conduct.
It still exists. King Charles does not light his own farts so as to raise a laugh from the great unwashed. His mother was more of a sport in such matters as I still vividly recall. She and Margaret Thatcher often used to compete in this manner. It is said that Raisa Gorbachev tried to get in on the action but ended up shitting herself. She blamed the Communist system & ordered her husband to end party control of the economy. Sad.
The latter crystallized during the High Middle Ages into the system of courtly virtues, a Christianized form of the Aristotelian cardinal virtues, which subdued the heroic to form the chivalrous and courteous.
There was Elinore of Aquitaine & the Courts of Love. It is said that she was inspired by Wallada bint al-Mustakfi- the Arabic Sappho. Indeed, it may be, that much of the paraphernalia of chivalry & the cult of the 'midons' was brought back from the Crusades. What is certain is that the genius of the 'commons' was better represented by the wife of Bath on the one hand & Julia of Norwich on the other.
Characteristically, in none of these virtues did the physical aspect entirely lose its significance, for virtue must be embodied, it had to be capable of public representation.
Not for Jews or Muslims or, later on, iconoclastic Protestants.
Especially in the joust, the replica of the cavalry battle, this representation came into its own.
There was still 'trial by combat' in those days. You won your suit if you could hire the better knight.
To be sure, the public sphere of the Greek polis was no stranger to a competitive display of arete-, but the publicity of courtly/ knightly representation which, appropriately enough, was fully displayed on feast days, the "high holy days," rather than on court days was completely unlike a sphere of political communication.
Nonsense! The thing was,
au fond, political & diplomatic- though generally futile. The
Field of the Cloth of Gold was a lavish 18-day diplomatic summit in June 1520 near Calais, where Henry VIII of England met Francis I of France to secure an alliance. Known for immense extravagance, the event featured luxurious tents, jousting, banquets, and a temporary palace, costing a fortune but achieving little.
I suppose Arthurian Romances- Camelot & all that- had given stupid shite of this sort a certain limited currency.
Rather, as the aura of feudal authority, it indicated social status.
No. It indicated wealth. There were plenty of poor Princes whose social status was indisputable but who could not put on such costly displays. True, some such sold everything to clothe themselves splendidly- 'the wore their estates on their backs'- in the hope of gaining advancement at Court.
This is why it had no particular "location": the knightly code of conduct was common as a norm to all nobles, from the king down to the lowliest knight standing just above the peasants.
The norm was that the rich hired mercs so as to grab land from their poorer cousins. Henry VII seized a lot of land after defeating Richard III. His was an arriviste dynasty which is why it went in for public spectacles on a grand scale. But this meant it had to seize Church land.
It provided orientation not merely on definite occasions at definite locales (say, "in" a public sphere) but constantly and everywhere, as representative of their lordly rights.
No. Even Henry VIII wasn't incessantly squandering money.
Only the ecclesiastical lords had, in addition to the occasions that were part of the affairs of the world, a specific locale for their representation: the church.
Most lords temporal had 'specific locales'- e.g. local councils or assembles- where they discharged a representative function. Lord Lieutenants were appointed from 1540 onward & remain with us to this day.
In church ritual, liturgy, mass, and processions, the publicity that characterized representation has survived into our time.
The UK has 98 Lord Lieutenants performing plenty of ceremonial functions every year.
According to a wellknown saying the British House of Lords, the Prussian General Staff, the French Academy, and the Vatican in Rome were the last pillars of representation;
Whoever said it was a fucking cretin.
finally only the Church was left, "so utterly alone that those who see in it no more than an external form cannot suppress the epigrammatic joke that it no longer represents anything except representation itself."
It claims to be the bride of Christ. Either it can get you into Heaven, or it can run some pretty decent schools & colleges & is a nice place to visit on a Sunday.
For all that, the relationship of the laity to the priesthood illustrates how the "surroundings" were part and parcel of the publicity of representation (from which they were nevertheless excluded)—
I suppose Habermas means the Catholic practice of 'private Mass' which some Protestants objected to. But, after the Fourth Lateran Council, public elevation of the host became increasingly popular. The Hussites believed that the communion cup (the wine) should be served to the laity (the general congregation), not just the clergy. This practice, known as communion sub utraque specie (under both kinds—bread and wine), was a defining tenet of their movement and a challenge to the Roman Catholic Church's practice at the time, which withheld the cup from the laity. Apparently the current practice only became common after 1970.
those surroundings were private in the sense in which the private soldier was excluded from representation and from military honor
It was unusual, in England, for a private soldier to receive a medal till about 1815 when the Waterloo medal was given to all ranks. My impression is that the family of a private soldier could buy him out (discharge by purchase) in the eighteenth century though this may only have been formalized later on.
The truth is there was a lot of forcible impressment or even 'kidnapping' in both the Navy & the Army. Those with wealthy or influential relatives might hope for rescue.
even though he had to be "part." The complement of this exclusion was a secret at the inner core of publicity:
some things were 'occulted'- i.e. remained a mystery. "We must not let daylight in upon the magic" is a famous 1867 quote by British constitutionalist Walter Bagehot from his work The English Constitution. It argues that the monarchy’s power relies on mystery, spectacle, and reverence rather than daily political scrutiny. Revealing the human flaws behind the institution ruins its symbolic "magic."
When I was young, the British press was still quite deferential to the Royal family. Now, of course, we get 'too much information' about those scallywags.
the latter was based on an arcanum.-, mass and the Bible were read in Latin rather than in the language of the people.
This was still the case for German Catholicism in 1962.
The representation of courtly-knightly publicity attained its ultimate pure form at the French and Burgundian courts in the fifteenth century.
One may say, they laid the foundation for the trajectory of Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523)- the most prominent example of a "humanist knight" in Germany- who was a crucial bridge between the Renaissance humanists and the Lutheran Reformation.
The famous Spanish ceremonial was the petrified version of this late flowering and in this form survived for several centuries at the courts of the Hapsburg
One might say, there was an Arabian influence on Burgundian etiquette which survived in the Spanish ceremonial. On the other hand, one can't say the thing had any magical power.
A new form of the representative publicness, whose source was the culture of the nobility of early capitalist northern Italy, emerged first in Florence
The Medicis were Tuscan peasants in the 12th century. They became 'patricians' but were not of the nobility.
and then in Paris
I suppose Habermas is thinking of Jacque Coeur, a wealthy banker who held high Royal appointments before disgrace & bankruptcy overtook him.
and London.
The indigenous English financier played second fiddle first to Jews (till their expulsion in the 13th century) and then the Lombards & other such unclean Continentals. It wasn't till the 18th century that English Goldsmith/bankers became serious contenders in international finance. However, its 'merchant adventurers' had been doing well in the Americas. Still, it wasn't till the second half of the eighteenth century that its Empire in the East gained a solid foundation.
It demonstrated its vigor, however, in its assimilation of bourgeois culture, whose early manifestation was humanism; the culture of humanism became a component of courtly life.
It was a component of the life of the well-to-do lawyer or Guild member. They had the money to pay for instruction in Greek. Erasmus, who was too poor to go to Italy, learned his Greek in England.
However, following the activities of the first tutors to princes (i.e., as early as around 1400) humanism—which developed the art of philological criticism only in the course of the sixteenth century— became the vehicle for reshaping the style of courtly life itself.
Henry Beauclerc (1068 – 1 December 1135) is considered the founder of the English fiscal state on the basis of Humanistic learning & a willingness to promote 'new men' who had administrative or legal talent. He built on the pre-existing Anglo-Saxon system of justice, local government and taxation, but added centralizing institutions such as the royal exchequer and itinerant justices. Sadly, his son died before him & his attempt to pass the crown to his daughter Matilda lead to war & 'the anarchy'. It was only in the late Fifteenth century that the aristocracy adopted the humanistic education already sought by 'commoners' at Oxford & Cambridge. It must be said, the Church had played a great role in educating poorer people & enabling them to rise up in monastic orders. This in turn meant better Schools & thus better secular scholars. Thus William Celling (the teacher of Linacre who was was the teacher of Erasmus) was probably of quite humble origin. It is said that he brought back a manuscript of Cicero's from his Italian sojourn.
I may mention that the growth of the law as a 'middle class' specialization stemmed at least in part from the promulgation, in 1219, by Pope Honorius III titled 'Super Specula' prohibiting the clergy from studying secular law as opposed to canon law. As a result, English common law began to be practised and taught by laymen instead of clerics. The Inns of Court- being familiar to the 'farmer' (i.e. one who hires land & labour & seeks for a profit) and the estate-manager or factor, as well as the victualler & the various Guild members- were, like Parliament itself, part of the 'public sphere' of the Commons. Humanistic education was seen as a way to refine those who practiced a somewhat coarse & calculating trade. This is still the case. We like to hear the accents of Eton & Balliol when we hire a rogue of a barrister to cheat some innocent on our behalf.
Under the influence of the Cortegiano
written by Castiglione who belonged to the nobility
the humanistically cultivated courtier replaced the Christian knight.
not in North Germany where the Teutonic Knights were grabbing land from Slavs & Balts & so forth. Elsewhere, the end of the Crusades in the thirteenth century, meant that the focus would shift to economic advancement & balance of power alliances.
The slightly later notions of the gentleman in Great Britain
i.e. a man with a private fortune who doesn't have to work for a living. However, as a courtesy, members of the 'noble' professions are treated as such.
and of the honnête homme
I think the French would exclude the eccentric or the melancholic from this class. The English gentlemen need not be agreeable. We hope that under his misanthropic manner, there lies a heart of gold. At any rate, we'd be grateful if he gave us some gold.
in France described similar types. Their serene and eloquent sociability was characteristic of the new "society" centered in the court.
or imitative of it, in the Provinces.
The independent provincial nobility based in the feudal rights attached to the land lost its power to represent;
If it had military power, it could do as it pleased. If it didn't, it wasn't 'independent' at all.
publicity of representation was concentrated at the prince's court.
There were plenty of Prefects or Lieutenant Governors all over the place.
The upshot of this was the baroque festivity in which all of its elements were united one more time, sensationally and magnificently.
or meaninglessly. Festivals end. People wake up with a hangover.
In comparison to the secular festivities of the Middle Ages and even of the Renaissance the baroque festival had already lost its public character in the literal sense.
It was as boring as one of Ben Jonson's masques.
Joust, dance, and theater retreated from the public places into the enclosures of the park,
No. The Globe continued to function till Parliament banned all plays & closed all theatres. If you put on Midsummer's Night in a Park some fucking Puritan would beat you. On the other hand, knights were constantly jousting in the Park- provided they were less than ten years old. Even the Puritans didn't ban all dancing.
from the streets into the rooms of the palace.
Very true. Dudes doing the hokey-cokey would frequently enter the Palace of Versailles. However, it was drunken seamstresses doing the can can who most disturbed the Sun King.
The castle park made its first appearance in the middle of the seventeenth century
because the King could pay his army & thus didn't fear the sudden attack of some bunch of his cousins.
but then spread rapidly over Europe along with the architecture of the French Century.
because artillery had prevailed over chivalry. Your cousins don armour & turn up to challenge you to a joust. Your artillery blows them to smithereens. You laugh your head off. The problem with artillery is that it costs lots of money. That is why feudalism had to go. You needed the agricultural sector to pay taxes in gold & silver which you could then use to buy guns.
Like the baroque palace itself, which was built around the grand hall in which the festivities were staged, the castle park permitted a courtly life sealed off from the outside world.
Habermas didn't seal off his family life from the outside world. His neighbours were obliged to watch him take a dump every day.
However, the basic pattern of the representative publicness not only survived but became more prominent. Mademoiselle de Scudery
the first 'blue-stocking'
reported in her Conversations the stress of the grand festivities; these served not so much the pleasure of the participants as the demonstration of grandeur, that is, the grandeur of the host and guests.
Showing you have money to burn shows you can also hire mercs with plenty of artillery.
The common people, content to look on, had the most fun.
Unless they had jobs.
Thus even here the people were not completely excluded; they were ever present in the streets. Representation was still dependent on the presence of people before whom it was displayed.
i.e. public display requires a public. Otherwise, it isn't display at all. When the Pope goes out onto his balcony vast crowds cheer for him. When I do so, even the neighbour's cat gets up and walks away in a marked manner.
Only the banquets of bourgeois notables became exclusive, taking place behind closed doors:
Families generally dine behind closed doors. They don't want a bunch of stray cats or dogs snatching the food from their plates.
Still, it is true that every peasant who wanted to watch the Sun King eat or shit or shower was welcome to enter the Palace of Versailles.
The bourgeois is distinguished from the courtly mentality by the fact that in the bourgeois home even the ballroom is still homey,
unless the good burgher is as rich as fuck
whereas in the palace even the living quarters are still festive.
Especially the living quarters of the servants.
And actually, beginning with Versailles, the royal bedroom develops into the palace's second center.
Admittance to the levee was by invitation only.
If one finds here the bed set up like a stage, placed on a platform, a throne for lying down, separated by a barrier from the area for the spectator, this is so because in fact this room is the scene of the daily ceremonies of lever and coucher, where what is most intimate is raised to public importance.
like wiping the King's bum. Do that often enough and the spirit of rebellion leaves you.
In the etiquette of Louis XIV concentration of the publicity of representation at the court attained the high point of refinement.
There was 'real presence'. There was no representation. The King was like the Eucharist- infused with a Holiness which was really there.
The aristocratic "society" that emerged from that Renaissance society no longer had to represent its own lordliness (i.e., its manorial authority),
Nobody had to represent their own body. They were their own body. They could represent somebody else, not themselves. A British Ambassador is the representative of the British King. But when the King is present, the Ambassador ceases to be his representative. The King is present to represent himself.
Manorial authority existed before and after the 'Renaissance'. It could be delegated. Manorial rights & fees still exist in England & Wales. I believe they have been abolished in Scotland. Such rights may be asserted in propria persona or they may be delegated.
or at least no longer primarily; it served as a vehicle for the representation of the monarch.
Nonsense! Peers of the Realm did not represent the monarch unless they had been appointed Lord Lieutenant or Governor or held other such office. Consider the Duke of Atholl. He has his own private army (now purely ceremonial). The current Duke is South African.
Only after national and territorial power states had arisen on the basis of the early capitalist commercial economy
like Venice & Genoa?
and shattered the feudal foundations of power
Power meant you could enforce feudalism- unless something else paid better.
could this court nobility develop the framework of a sociability—highly individuated, in spite of its comprehensive etiquette—into that peculiarly free-floating but clearly demarcated sphere of "good society" in the eighteenth century.
This is utter nonsense. Russia under Peter, Elizabeth & Catherine was getting more and more in the way of 'good society' at precisely the time when serfdom was becoming more stringent. What mattered was that, as in China, noble rank was linked to service to the State. Prussia was able to do something similar, but Joseph II failed. In England, there was never any question of noble rank being linked to service of the State though this was an honourable method of getting promoted. Thus a British baron might consent to go rule over the coolies of India in return for being promoted to the rank and style of Viscount. True, the Dukes & Earls & Marquesses would still make fun of him but the other Barons would be totes jelly.
The final form of the representative publicness,
was an elected lower chamber of Parliament
reduced to the monarch's court
which became less important than the 'Cabinet'
and at the same time receiving greater emphasis, was already an enclave within a society separating itself from the state.
West European monarchies were 'limited' but, in the Seventeenth Century, some monarchs sought to become Absolute. The Stuarts failed. The Sun king, who said 'L'État, c'est moi' was more successful. In England there was a question as to whether a person known to be Catholic in private life could come to the throne. After the Glorious Revolution, it was decided that the monarch had fewer 'private' rights than a commoner. He couldn't legally marry a Catholic whereas any cobbler or costermonger was free to do so.
Now for the first time private and public spheres became separate in a specifically modern sense.
There are many different modern senses of every word in the language. There is no one 'specifically' modern sense to it. One may say 'in private life, X is witty & charming. It is only in public life, that he is boring & stupid.' But this- or something like it- could have been said of any person in any age. The idea is that when this bloke is with his intimates, he shines. Sadly, his shyness means he comes across as stupid and boring when in the company of those he does not know well.
Thus the German word privat, which was borrowed from the Latin privatus, can be found only after the middle of the sixteenth century,
when education was spreading & the vernacular was being tarted up by scholarly writers
having the same meaning as was assumed by the English "private" and the French privé. It meant as much as "not holding public office or official position.'
A person holding a public office might also own private property. For some purposes, he acts in an official capacity. For other purposes, he acts as a private person.
"Private" designated the exclusion from the sphere of the state apparatus;
No. There is no 'exclusion'. Private property- unless it is allodial- is subject to various State imposed taxes or duties.
for "public" referred to the state that in the meantime had developed, under absolutism, into an entity having an objective existence over against the person of the ruler.
This was the case even where there had been no absolutism- e.g. USA. There is little or no allodial land in that country. 'Eminent domain' prevails.
The public [das Publikum, le public), was the "public authority" (öffentliche Gewalt) in contrast to everything "private" (Privatwesen).
Lawyers can explain why an enterprise which appears to be private can nevertheless be treated in Law as a 'public authority'. Habermas appears to be unaware of this distinction. The legal concept here is that of the Beliehener (a private person or entity authorized to exercise public authority in some particular manner).
The servants of the state were öffentliche Personen, public persons, or personnes publiques; they were incumbent in some official position, their official business was "public" (öffentliches Amt, service public), and government buildings and institutions were called "public." On the other hand, there were private individuals, private offices, private business, and private homes; Gotthelf speaks of the Privatmann (private person). The authorities were contrasted with the subjects excluded from them; the former served, so it was said, the public welfare, while the latter pursued their private interests. The major tendencies that prevailed by the end of the eighteenth century are well-known. The feudal powers, the Church, the prince, and the nobility, who were the carriers of the representative publicness, disintegrated in a process of polarization; in the end they split into private elements, on the one hand, and public ones, on the other.
Not the Church. Germany retains the custom of collecting (through income tax) the tithe that goes to the Church, or other Religious organization, to which the person is deemed to belong. Apparently, there is some complicated way of getting out of this. England, of course, still has an Established Church.
The status of the Church changed as a result of the Reformation; the anchoring in divine authority that it represented—that is, religion—became a private matter.
In England, Dissenters & Catholics, etc. faced certain legal disabilities till about 1830.
The so-called freedom of religion
obtained to a greater degree in practice than in law.
historically secured the first sphere of private autonomy;
When? In Germany this only happened in 1919 though, from 1868 onwards, the thing was de facto.
the Church itself continued to exist as one corporate body among others under public law.
England & Scotland & Denmark & Norway & so forth, have Established Churches.
The first visible mark of the analogous polarization of princely authority was the separation of the public budget from the territorial ruler's private holdings.
In Germany this occurred over the course of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. In England the process was begun under Beauclerc in the 12th century.
The bureaucracy, the military (and to some extent also the administration of justice) became independent institutions of public authority separate from the progressively privatized sphere of the court.
In England, Parliament became supreme in the mid-Seventeenth Century though there was some push-back which ended with the import of Hanoverian Kings.
Out of the estates, finally, the elements of political prerogative developed into organs of public authority: partly into a parliament, and partly into judicial organs.
Neither of which were particularly good in inter-war Germany. Habermas did not understand why this was so. The answer is that Hugo Preuss's constitution created the possibility of a 'Caesarean President'- i.e. a Kaiser or Fuhrer who would do stupid, evil, shit. I suppose Habermas had watched 'Judgment at Nuremberg'. No doubt, it dealt a blow to his amour propre. German Judges made a great play of pedantry but were utterly spineless.
Elements of occupational status group organization, to the degree that they were already involved in the urban corporations and in certain differentiations within the estates of the land, developed into the sphere of "civil society" that as the genuine domain of private autonomy stood opposed to the state.
Sadly, in Germany, nobody wanted to oppose the State when it claimed that conquering neighbouring countries would mean more beer and sausages for everybody.
Excursus: The Demise of the Representative Publicness Illustrated by the Case of Wilhelm Meister
Sadly Wilhelm didn't top himself like Werther.
Forms of the representative publicness,
i.e. the theatre. Meister joins a theatrical troupe. Mignon's song is the only good thing in the book.
to be sure, remained very much in force up to the beginning of the nineteenth century; this held true especially for economically and politically backward Germany, in which Goethe wrote the second version of his Wilhelm Meister.
One reason it was economically and politically backward was because it was beastly to Jews. Apparently many set up theatrical troupes. The actual Jew Suss's mother was a respectable woman from the ghetto who married a wealthy banker. In the novel, she is represented as an actress whose lover was a German aristocrat. If Suss reveals this he can escape capital punishment. He is too proud to do so.
This novel contains a letter in which Wilhelm renounces the world of bourgeois activity
i.e. the boring business of doing business
embodied by his brother-in-law Werner. Wilhelm explains why it is that the stage means all the world to him. Namely, it meant the world of the nobility, of good society—the public sphere as publicity of representation—as he states in the following passage: A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will.
Shakespeare could have remained in Stratford-upon-Avon and risen in wealth as a manufacturer of fine leather gloves. Instead he became an actor. Like Hamlet, Princes & even prelates might cultivate & emulate the actor/playwright so as to make their person more dignified & commanding of respect. Also, if- like Edward Vere de Vere- you happen to fart in the Queen's presence, you are able to pass off the matter in an urbane manner by quoting Aeschylus-
Συγγνώμην αἰτῶ τῆσδε δυσσεβείας·
οὐκ ἐγώ, τὸ δαῖταρ ἡ παροῦσα
πνοαῖς ἀφ’ ἑσπέρου βορβόρου
χαιρετισμὸν ἔπεμψεν ὀλιγόβιον,
καὶ νῦν ὑπὸ γαίης πάλιν ἔδυ.
(Pardon me for being so rude, It was not me, it was my food, It just popped up to say hello, And now it's gone back down below)
Since the nobleman frequenting the society of the most polished, is compelled to give himself a polished manner;
Actually, if you are noble and rich enough, you can fart your heart out. The problem faced by the 17th Earl of Oxford, was that he had frittered away his patrimony. Still, it is said, after the Earl had returned to England after many years abroad, Gloriana greeted him pertly saying 'My Lord, I had forgot the fart!'
since this manner, neither door nor gate being shut against him, grows at last an unconstrained one; since, in court or camp, his figure, his person, are a part of his possessions, and it may be, the most necessary part,—he has reason enough to put some value on them, and to show that he puts some.
This was true for the nobleman seeking to alleviate his poverty by gaining preferment or some office of profit. Adam Smith observes that a French Duke would think nothing of screaming his tits off & rolling around on the floor, if the King refused his request for some such benefaction.
The nobleman was authority inasmuch as he made it present.
The actor did that. Then everybody copied the actor and the thing became de rigueur. It was often said of her late Majesty, the last Queen-Empress of India, that she had acquired her air de raffinement by closely observing and modelling herself on the conduct of Noel Coward towards the coarser sort of sailor.
He displayed it, embodied it in his cultivated personality; thus "He is a public person-, and the more cultivated his movements, the more sonorous his voice, the more staid and measured his whole being is, the more perfect is he; . . . and whatever else there may be in him or about him, capacities, talents, wealth, all seem gifts of supererogation."
If Goethe had met David Garrick, he'd have lost his feakin' mind.
Goethe one last time caught the reflection of the representative publicness whose light, of course, was refracted in the French rococo court and refracted yet again in its imitation by the petty German princes.
This was a sort of reverse 'Tardean mimetics' where the nobility imitated the actors who were best at playing aristocrats. But Princes had always had tutors of various types or, if they had been brought up very strictly, they made it a point, on attaining majority, to cultivate the acquaintance of 'men of fashion'- like Beau Brummel for the Prince Regent.
The different hues emerged all the more preciously: the appearance of the "lord," who was "public" by virtue of representation, was stylized into the embodiment of gracefulness, and in this publicity he ceremoniously fashioned an aura around himself.
This was mere adolescent schwarmerei- a systematic confusion of the glamour of the stage with the stultifying routine of the courtier's life. Max Beerbohm killed the thing off with his 'Diminuendo'. Who in late Victorian England lived a life such as that Walter Pater, in the Conclusion to 'The Renaissance', most commends? The answer was dispiriting. It was a fat lecher whose wife was mercifully deaf.
'The prodigious life of the Prince of Wales fascinated me above all: indeed, it still fascinates me. What experience has been withheld from His Royal Highness? Was ever so supernal a type, as be, of mere Pleasure? How often he has watched, at Newmarket, the scud-a-run of quivering homuncules over the vert on horses, on, from some night-boat, the holocaust of great wharves by the side of the Thames; raced through the blue Solent; threaded les coulisses!
' He has danced in every palace of every capital, played in every club. He has hunted elephants through the jungles of India, boar through the forests of Austria, pigs over the plains of Massachusetts. From the Castle of Abergeldie has led his Princess into the frosty night, Highlanders lighting with torches the path to the deer-larder, where lay the wild things that had fallen to him on the crags. He has marched the Grenadiers to chapel through the white streets of Windsor. He has ridden through Moscow, in strange apparel, to kiss the catafalque of more than one Tzar. For him the Rajahs of India have spoiled their temples, and Blondin has crossed Niagara along the tigbt-rope, and the Giant Guard done drill beneath the chandeliers of the Neue Schloss. Incline he to scandal, lawyers are proud to whisper their secrets in his ear. Be he gallant, the ladies are at his feet. Ennuyé [bored], all the wits from Bernal Osborne to Arthur Roberts have jested for him. He has been "present always at the focus where the greatest number of forces unite in their purest energy," for it is his presence that makes those forces unite.'
'"Ennuyé?" I asked. Indeed he never is. How could he be when Pleasure hangs constantly upon his arm! It is those others, overtaking her only after arduous chase, breathless and footsore, who quickly sicken of her company, and fall fainting at her feet. And for me, shod neither with rank nor riches, what folly to join the chase! I began to see how small a thing it were to sacrifice those external "experiences," so dear to the heart of Pater, by a rigid, complex civilisation made so hard to gain. They gave nothing but lassitude to those who had gained them through suffering. Even to the kings and princes, who so easily gained them, what did they yield besides themselves? I do not suppose that, if we were invited to give authenticated instances of intelligence on the part of our royal pets, we could fill half a column of the Spectator. In fact, their lives are so full they have no time for thought, the highest energy of man. Now, it was to thought that my life should be dedicated. Action, apart from its absorption of time, would war otherwise against the pleasures of intellect, which, for me, meant mainly the pleasures of imagination. It is only (this is a platitude) the things one has not done, the faces or places one has not seen, or seen but darkly, that have charm. It is only mystery — such mystery as besets the eyes of children — that makes things superb. I thought of the voluptuaries I had known — they seemed so sad, so ascetic almost, like poor pilgrims, raising their eyes never or ever gazing at the moon of tarnished endeavour.'
Goethe, did have tangible achievements to his credit. Germany is right to take pride in him. But Germany's 'royal pets' were unworthy of adulation. They may have provided England with good enough Protestant Kings, but neither in proprio persona, nor in representation (including Carlyle's tome on the great Freddie) were they other than boring shitheads.
Goethe again used "public person" in the traditional sense of public representation, although in the language of his age it had already taken on the more recent meaning of a servant of public authority or of a servant of the state.
Goethe is 'romantic'. He subverts what is real by preferring what is staged. Can he, like Novalis's forgetful Wizard, gain the felicity of seeing his own creations as autonomous and self-subsistent? The answer is given by another question. Could Napoleon live in a world where half the crowned heads of Europe where his siblings or cousins? No. Waterloo happened. There could be a tawdry sort of Restoration without the zest of English Restoration Comedy. But, already, as George Moore saw, the artificial light of the Nineteenth Century would be extinguished in the pitiless noon-tide of Twentieth Century Social Justice.
The "person," however, was immediately modified into the "cultured personality." Strictly speaking, the nobleman in the context of this letter served as something of a pretext for the thoroughly bourgeois idea of the freely self-actualizing personality that already showed the imprint of the neohumanism of the German classical period.
After all, the classical period owed much to novi homines- new men, like Goethe who was ennobled and who did much to raise the prestige of his master the Duke. But the 'soul of Weimar' did not inhabit the body of the Weimar Republic. Why? Stupid professors like Pruess & Weber wrote its constitution.
In our context Goethe's observation that the bourgeoisie could no longer represent,
he didn't say that. He said, it wasn't doing so at a time when Germany was economically and politically backward. The scale and scope of private enterprise was severely restricted. The country needed a Zollverein & a proper Diet of it own to solve collective action problems and to permit the exploitation of economies of scope & scale.
that by its very nature it could no longer create for itself a representative publicness, is significant.
When could it do so? In the time of Luther? But then came the Peasant's revolt. The bourgeoisie needed the Princes more than the other way around.
The nobleman was what he represented;
Till he was 'mediatized' or simply chased out of his domain.
the bourgeois, what he produced:
Either the Prince produces good enough soldiers when required or he stops being a Prince.
"If the nobleman, merely by his personal carriage, offers all that can be asked of him,
That would be an actor or prostitute. A nobleman has to have either money or access to military support. This may involve marrying the Banker's daughter or enrolling in the Imperial Army.
the burgher by his personal carriage offers nothing, and can offer nothing.
Nonsense! The guy may become the Schelling focal solution for coordination games- e.g. being chosen head of a Guild or being sent to the Imperial Diet as the elector for his free City.
The former has a right to seem: the latter is compelled to be, and what he aims at seeming becomes ludicrous and tasteless."
A rich merchant can put on any airs & graces he pleases. Only if he is dependent on others for capital or markets does he need to appear 'no better than he ought to be'.
The representative bearing that the nouveau riche wanted to assume turned into a comical make believe.
Unless they had plenty of cash- like the English 'milord' visiting the Continent. The 'Collector of Boggley Wollah' was little regarded in plutocratic London but, in Brussels, he is a figure of some consequence.
Hence, Goethe advised not to ask him "'What art thou ?' but only: 'What hast thou?
If the answer is great inherited wealth, a title of nobility will be added to it quickly enough.
What discernment, knowledge, talent, wealth?'"
The first three may help you acquire wealth. But if you inherit it, everybody will find you discerning, knowledgeable & talented. Money is honey, my dear sonny, & a rich man's joke is always funny.
This is a statement which Nietzsche's later aristocratic pretensions adopted: a man proved himself not by what he could do, but by who he was.
a syphilitic nutter?
Wilhelm confesses to his brother-in-law the need "to become a public person and to please and influence in a larger circle." Yet since he is no nobleman and as a bourgeois also does not want to make the vain effort merely to appear to be one, he seeks out the stage as a substitute, so to speak, for publicity.
Shakespeare went in for the stage & did well by it. Goethe went in for literature & did very well by it.
Here lies the secret of his theatrical mission: "On the boards a polished man appears in his splendor with personal accomplishments, just as he does so in the upper classes of society."
This was a period when military uniforms were dazzling in their splendour. Sadly, wearing them might involve getting shot.
It may well be that it was the secret equivocation of the "cultured personality" ("the necessity I feel to cultivate my mental faculties and tastes"), the bourgeois intention in the figure projected as a nobleman, that permitted the equation of theatrical performance with public representation.
Napoleon, a gifted writer in addition to being something of a genius in the use of artillery, turned statesmanship into a dazzling theatrical performance. But, for Germany, there was some substance to the reforms he instituted or catalysed. Even in England, he had his admirers. The lunatic, proverbially, identified himself as Napoleon not Wellington though the latter did better for himself.
But in turn the perception of the disintegration of the representative publicness in bourgeois society was so much on the mark and the inclination to belong to it nevertheless so strong that there must be more to the matter than a simple equivocation.
There is. Even noblemen need to achieve something. Goethe, it must be said, was a high achiever.
Wilhelm came before his public as Hamlet, successfully at first.
He plays the Prince as a 'pure soul'- an idealist. But Hamlet, is known, in North Germany, from Saxo Grammaticus. The motif of feigned madness, is common to 'trickster-hero' folktales. Naturally, the public gets tired of Wilhelm's version.
The public, however, was already the carrier of a different public sphere, one that no longer had anything in common with that of representation.
Wilhelm isn't representing Hamlet accurately. Initially, there's a bit of novelty but his approach makes nonsense of the play. Something similar was said of my depiction of Ophelia. Apparently she wasn't actually an orangutan. Sad.
In this sense Wilhelm Meister's theatrical mission had to fail. It was out of step, as it were, with the bourgeois public sphere whose platform the theatre had meanwhile become.
Between 1767 and 1797, over ten German national theatres were founded. The older
Wanderbühne wandering troupes were losing salience. 'Storm & Stress' replaced a repertoire that owed much to England & Italy. Mixing up melodrama, low comedy, & virtuoso flights of rhetoric was felt to demean the 'moral authority' of the stage as having a specific 'Nation building' role.
Beaumarchais's Figaro had already entered the stage and along with him, according to Napoleon's famous words, the revolution.
The English chopped off the head of their King some 30 years after Shakespeare died.
With the emergence of early finance and trade capitalism,
from the 11th century onward
the elements of a new social order were taking shape.
So were the elements of social orders which were never established.
From the thirteenth century
There were ups and downs. Germany, it must be said, was doing well as it expanded to its East.
on they spread from the northern Italian city-states to western and northern Europe and caused the rise first of Dutch centers for staple goods (Bruges, Liittich, Brussels, Ghent, etc.)
The Italian city states & the Hanseatic League were doing well
and then of the great trade fairs at the crossroads of long-distance trade. Initially, to be sure, they were integrated without much trouble by the old power structure. That initial assimilation of bourgeois humanism
which was initially clerical, not bourgeois.
to a noble courtly culture,
there were humanist knights. Speaking generally, a Court would have its share of learned monks while Abbeys too served an educational functional for the aristocracy.
as we observe it paradigmatically during the rise of Florentine Renaissance society,
Venice had been growing since the 7th century. Yet the Renaissance took root there later than in Florence. The 'Venetian myth' of a harmonious, stable, society made for pragmatism on the one hand and conformism on the other.
must also be seen against this background.
Why? The truth is that if 'trade capitalism' is the explanans, then Habermas would have to explain why Florence had a different trajectory from Venice or Genoa.
Early capitalism was conservative not only as regards the economic mentality so vividly described by Sombait (a characteristic way of doing business typified by "honorable" gain') but also as regards politics.
It was pragmatic. It is anachronistic to speak of it as being conservative. One could say it was 'conformist' in some places & adventurous in other places.
As long as it lived from the fruits of the old mode of production (the feudal organization of agricultural production involving an enserfed peasantry and the petty commodity production of the corporatively organized urban craftsmen) without transforming it, it retained ambivalent characteristics.
Venice wasn't itself feudal though some of its colonies were by around 1300. A century later, there was some inherited feudalism in its Italian hinterland but, overall, the institution was ebbing. The plain fact is, feudalism is autarkic. It is difficult for it to sustain an expanded commerce. As the technology of war changed, Princes needed ready money to hire mercenaries & buy better canons. Sometimes this meant uprooting serfs & letting 'sheep eat men'. John Lydgate's 15th-century work The Debate Between Horse, Goose, and Sheep, makes this point tellingly. The horse- so useful in battle- claims pre-eminence. But the feathers of the goose had enabled the arrows of the English at Agincourt to fell armoured French knights. The Sheep represents Christ in one sense but, alas!, wealth gained from wool might cause the monarch to engage in a ruinous war with France.
On the one hand this capitalism stabilized the power structure of a society organized in estates,
No. Capitalism (which is based on 'usury') first had to kick the First Estate (the Clergy) in the goolies. The Second Estate (Nobility) lost salience once the King got his hands on enough cash to buy artillery and mercenaries. However, it could ally with the bourgeoisie (as the Whigs were wont to do) or else with the poorer landed gentry & rural clergy (the Tories), and retain a measure of importance. But it was the Commons- which elected the lower house of Parliament- which would hold the purse-strings once the power to tax was restricted to that chamber.
and on the other hand it unleashed the very elements within which this power structure would one day dissolve.
On the one hand, dogs are cats and, on the other hand, cats are actually flying pigs. The fact is the Commons triumphed. The House of Lords has been filled by spivs & senile hacks.
We are speaking of the elements of the new commercial relationships: the traffic in commodities and news created by early capitalist long-distance trade.
Henry the Navigator sponsored this himself. He had previously brought in German metallurgists to build him better canons which could be used very effectively in the novel type of caravel he had commissioned. Kings could take an active part in 'capitalist long-distance trade'. A question we might ask is why Portugal & Spain which were richer & had a bigger bourgeoisie in 1600 failed to create a 'bourgeois public sphere' of the English type? The fact is the School of Salmanca, as represented by Cervantes in his great novel, was ahead of England in terms of what we might call 'laissez faire' or 'proto-Austrian' thinking. The answer, I suppose is that they did have such a sphere but faced demographic and other economic problems compounded by some truly idiotic rulers.
The towns, of course, had local markets from the beginning. In the hands of the guilds and the corporations, however, these remained strictly regulated, serving more as instruments for the domination of the surrounding areas than for free commodity exchange between town and country.
Habermas is probably drawing on German accounts of the 'pre-March' period. However, there were pockets of development even then.
With the rise of long-distance trade, for which—according to Pirenne's observations—the town was only a base of operations, markets of a different sort arose.
They were of the same sort. They just became more efficient & larger in scope. I suppose, Habermas means the increasing use of bills of exchange from the 13th century onward. But such instruments, with more limited currency, had been a feature of earlier networks- e.g. the Radhanites.
They became consolidated into periodic trade fairs and, with the development of techniques of capitalist financing (it is known that letters of credit and promissory notes were in use at the trade fairs of the Champagne as early as the thirteenth century), were established as stock exchanges. In 1531 Antwerp became a "permanent trade fair."
Venice got there first- more especially after the 'Golden Bull of 1082' when they gained tax-free trading rights in the Byzantine Empire. London only became bigger than Venice towards the end of the seventeenth century. By 1740, it was ahead of both Venice & Amsterdam.
This commercial exchange developed according to rules which certainly were manipulated by political power; yet a far-reaching network of horizontal economic dependencies emerged that in principle could no longer be accommodated by the vertical relationships of dependence characterizing the organization of domination in an estate system based upon a self-contained household economy.
But, in practice, anything can be accommodated by anything. Europe bought oil from Iran when it was feudal & continued to buy oil from it after it turned Islamic. Trump, sadly, has refused to become the next Supreme Guide of Iran. I believe that job has now been offered to Pussy Riot. We don't care whether our oil is extracted by serfs or howling lesbians. We just want cheapish oil.
Of course, the political order remained unthreatened by the new processes which, as such, had no place in the existing framework, as long as the members of the old ruling stratum participated in them only as consumers.
They participated as willing sellers of grain, wool, slaves, tin, coal, or anything else that could be dug out of the ground at a profit. It isn't the case that your average Arab Sheikh spends all his time buying super-yachts. He also ensures that plenty of oil is pumped out of the sand and sold to the highest bidder.
When they earmarked an increasing portion of what was produced on their lands for the acquisition of luxury goods made available through long-distance trade,
this involved selling the surplus from their agricultural land.
this by itself did not bring traditional production—and hence the basis of their rule—into dependence on the new capital.
You have to sell stuff to get the money to buy stuff. Habermas thought the aristo would display his 'presence' to the merchant who would become overawed and give him cool stuff for free. Such was not the case- even if the aristocrat said 'I represent God & the Emperor of the fucking Galaxy' , they would politely but firmly tell him to fuck the fuck off.
The traffic in news that developed alongside the traffic in commodities showed a similar pattern.
No. The market for news was more limited. People who bought tea were not concerned with political news from China. One or two tea-brokers may have been. They might spend money on getting accurate information sent to them from distant ports. But, speaking generally, this would be kept secret.
It is said that the Rothschilds had a network of carrier pigeons which enabled them to get news of the Waterloo victory before anyone else. They made a fortune buying consols.
With the expansion of trade, merchants' market-oriented calculations required more frequent and more exact information about distant events.
They just needed a price vector & maybe a futures market. There were always third party 'arbitrageurs' (market makers) ready to take on volatility risk for a suitable reward.
From the fourteenth century on, the traditional letter carrying by merchants was for this reason organized into a kind of guildbased system of correspondence for their purposes. The merchants organized the first mail routes, the so-called ordinary mail, departing on assigned days. The great trade cities became at the same time centers for the traffic in news; the organization of this traffic on a continuous basis became imperative to the degree to which the exchange of commodities and of securities became continuous.
This was only of concern to 'market makers'. The 'broker' quoted anybody and everybody a 'buy' and a 'sell' price. True, in some places (e.g. India not so long ago) a bunch of brokers might try to 'fix' the market. Thus two such people approaching each other would utter not a word. Instead they would drape a towel over their hands & strike the bargain using a secret code. The peasant selling his grain would be unable to find out what the true 'market clearing' price was. Such practices, under Common law, are per se illegal as being 'in restraint of trade'.
Almost simultaneously with the origin of stock markets, postal services
where they were profitable
and the press
where it was profitable
institutionalized regular contacts and regular communication.
only where it was profitable.
To be sure, the merchants were satisfied with a system that limited information to insiders; the urban and court chanceries preferred one that served only the needs of administration. Neither had a stake in information that was public. What corresponded to their interests, rather, were "news letters," the private correspondences commercially organized by newsdealers.
Newspapers could be profitable more particularly if they carried advertisements. When I was a child the 'Times' newspaper in the UK carried only advertisements, or obit notices, on its front page. It was assumed that the typical subscriber, reading the Times at the breakfast table, gloated greatly over the deaths of his contemporaries.
The new sector of communications, with its institutions for a traffic in news, fitted in with the existing forms of communication without difficulty as long as the decisive element— publicness—was lacking.
The problem was taxes and licences. But this was a 'barrier to entry' and permitted the growth of a News oligopoly admirably suited to the two-party system.
Just as, according to Sombart's definition, one could speak of "mail" only when the regular opportunity for letter dispatch became accessible to the general public,
Fair point. The Mongols had a very efficient system of news gathering but it wasn't for the hoi polloi. Still, they gave a great impetus to trade.
so there existed a press in the strict sense only once the regular supply of news became public, that is, again, accessible to the general public. But this occurred only at the end of the seventeenth century.
where the thing was profitable. Weekly newspapers began to appear in Germany from 1605 onward.
Until then the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word.
Nonsense! The King's cryer- or the bedesman, as in Scott's 'the Antiquary'- performed this function. It wasn't the case that the King had to turn up himself to tell everybody what he wanted done. One might say the newspaper, the magazine & the pamphlet represented a mix of 'views' & 'news' which was novel. One may say that Leonardo Bruni, who died in 1444, writing the first modern History books, changed how contemporary events were seen. History could be a 'Carmen solutum'- i.e. a free-style poem with a pattern or purpose not readily discernible in a bare chronicle of events.
There was as yet no publication of commercially distributed news;
except in China
the irregularly published reports of recent events were not comparable to the routine production of news.
They were comparable. What mattered was the depth of the market or the possibility of a subsidy.
These elements of early capitalist commercial relations, that is, the traffic in commodities and news, manifested their revolutionary power only in the mercantilist phase in which, simultaneously with the modern state, the national and territorial economies assumed their shapes.
This is mere supposition. The truth is newspapers had a revolutionary effect in places like British India- which wasn't Mercantilist at all. Traffic in commodities just means monetization which in turn means people have spare cash to buy books or pamphlets or newspapers. The latter are actually very useful in preserving literacy skills. That's why A.O Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, founded two newspapers in Etawah- where he was posted as Collector. Unless the people who had attended the schools he set up had something new to read every week or every month, many would forget how to do so.
When in 1597 the German Hanse was definitively expelled from London,
because the English navy could avenge the defeat it suffered in 1474
and when a few years later the Company of Merchant Adventurers established itself in Hamburg, this signified not merely the economic and political ascendancy of Great Britain
The Kingdom of Great Britain came into existence in 1707. It didn't have economic or political ascendancy yet though, under William of Orange, it became the senior partner vis a vis Holland. The fourth Anglo Dutch war in the 1780s ended in an ignominious defeat for the Netherlands. Still, 'ascendancy' was only secure after Trafalgar.
but an altogether new stage of capitalism.
No. It was a new stage in the evolution of English Naval power.
From the sixteenth century on merchant companies were organized on an expanded capital basis;
Portuguese & Spanish 'voyages of discover' were often financed by private capital, Italian bankers, monastic orders etc.
unlike the old traders in staple goods, they were no longer satisfied with limited markets.
This is the old canard that evil Capitalists are forcing us to buy toothpaste to clean our teeth & toilet paper to wipe our bums. The fact is 'traders in staple goods' would like to become 'traders in exotic luxuries' because the margins are higher. If such luxuries are to be found on the other side of the world, private capital will be forthcoming to finance voyages there.
By means of grand expeditions they opened up new markets for their products.
Their product was guns. They created 'gunpowder Empires' & extracted gold, diamonds, ivory & slaves by using their guns to shoot natives.
It isn't the case that Christopher Columbus was trying to get native Caribs to buy Mama Mia Spaghetti sauce.
In order to meet the rising need for capital and to distribute the growing risks, these companies soon assumed the form of slock companies. Beyond this, however, they needed strong political guarantees.
Otherwise they would relocate to a more accommodative jurisdiction or, like the Pirates, set sail for Tortuga.
The markets for foreign trade were now justly considered "institutional products"; they resulted from political efforts and military force.
It was only in the late Nineteenth century- during the scramble for Africa- that the slogan 'trade follows the flag!' was raised. The truth is, nobody thought Africans had the money to buy European goods. The idea was to enslave them & get them to produce a lot of cash crops. True, you had to pretend to be against slavery. So you said 'we are imposing a hut tax so as to finance public education & health.' But you didn't actually set up lots of schools. You forced the African to work on your plantation so he could get cash to pay the hut tax. Still, Commie nutters could pretend that Evil Capitalists were trying to get starving darkies to buy Cadillacs. Did you know the real reason Bush invaded Iraq was not to get his hands on lots of lovely oil, but so as to sell Iraqis Stetson hats?
The old home towns were thus replaced as bases of operations by the state territory.
What Habermas means is that States could easily defeat the fleets of the Hanse. Venice too ceased to be 'mistress of the Sea'.
The process that Heckscher
known for the Hecksher-Ohlin theorem. Sadly, he switched to economic history and gassed on interminably about 'Mercantilism'.
describes as the nationalization of the town based economy began.
The City of London was always national. It didn't need to be nationalised.
Of course, within this process was constituted what has since been called the "nation"—the modern state with its bureaucracies and its increasing financial needs.
The Brits managed well enough with a minimal state. Then they noticed that Continental powers which invested in public education & Universities which taught STEM subjects rather than Port swilling & Sodomy were pulling ahead in new, high tech, industries.
This development in turn triggered a feedback that accelerated mercantilist policy. Neither private loans made to the prince by financiers nor public borrowing were sufficient to cover these needs; only an efficient system of taxation met the demand for capital.
The top rate of tax in the UK during the Napoleonic wars was 10 percent. It was abolished in 1816. The move to free-trade led to greatly reduced tariff revenue & its reintroduction in 1842. But it stayed low- between three & six percent till the Great War when it peaked at 30 percent in 1918.
The modern state was basically a state based on taxation,
unlike the ancient state which was based on hugs & kisses.
the bureaucracy of the treasury the true core of its administration. The separation precipitated thereby between the prince's personal holdings and what belonged to the state was paradigmatic of the objectification of personal relations of domination.
It was the opposite. Consider an Arab Sheikhdom like Oman where there was no such separation. The personal relation of domination existed- even with respect to the son & heir. Thankfully, a British chum of his helped him get rid of his father. He modernized Oman. People respected & felt affection for the ruler. But there was no 'personal relation of domination'. Indeed, the new Sultan even abolished slavery! All in all, his conduct was that of a Sandhurst trained officer & gentleman. His successor is carrying on his good work.
Local administrations were brought under the control of the state, in Great Britain through the institution of the Justice of the Peace,
they have existed since 1195. The term 'justice of the peace' dates from 1361. They were local people of good repute who were not paid a salary. They weren't controlled by the State but were part of a 'Squirearchy' such that laws passed by the House of Commons (which was drawn from people like the JPs) were eagerly implemented at the local level. In more populous areas, stipendiary magistrates were needed because of the greater number of cases. No one in England ever thought of the JP as a tool of the state- as opposed to a member of a certain class.
on the continent, after the French model, with the help of superintendents.
There can be no comparison between the two systems.
The reduction in the kind of publicity involved in representation
i.e. the King showing up and showing everybody his cute behind.
that went hand in hand with the elimination of the estate based authorities
there was no such elimination. In the 15th century the Star Chamber took over private criminal jurisdiction, but Manorial courts, still managed local disputes and copyhold land tenure till the 19th century. It was only in 1922 that copyhold was abolished & Manorial courts became wholly redundant.
by those of the territorial ruler created room for another sphere known as the public sphere in the modern sense of the term: the sphere of public authority.
This had existed since the days of the Conquest when William appointed sheriffs (or "shire-reeves' as his representatives in the districts. The 'circuit system' (Eyre or iter) dates from the end of the twelfth century. Both the coroner & the sheriff represented 'public authority'.
The latter assumed objective existence in a permanent administration and a standing army.
No. It was enough if the thing was periodic or could be assembled when required. Habermas has an obsession with 'real presence'. He would go crazy if he discovers that Courts go on vacation or recess. He would assume that criminals could do what they liked because 'Justice' would literally be on holiday!
Now continuous state activity corresponded to the continuity of contact among those trafficking in commodities and news (stock market, press).
Nonsense! In the old days, people spent some time in town- which is when the Courts & commodities markets were open- and a lot of time at home on their estates. It was only slowly that services & manufacturing supplanted agriculture as the mainstay of the economy.
Public authority was consolidated into a palpable object confronting those who were merely subject to it and who at first were only negatively defined by it.
No. It could be inchoate. Habermas must have seen Cowboy movies, where the good folk of the town menaced by rustlers get together in the Church hall. Some dude is appointed Sheriff & he deputizes a posse comitatus to go after the bad guys. Sadly, some 'vigilance committees' illegally executed suspected rustlers etc.
For they were the private people who, because they held no office, were excluded from any share in public authority.
They could serve on a jury & decide who would hang and who would go free.
"Public" in this narrower sense was synonymous with "state-related";
In which case it would be referred to as 'Federal' or 'State', in the US or as His Majesty's, in the UK.
the attribute no longer referred to the representative "court" of a person endowed with authority but instead to the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over the legitimate use of coercion.
Either that 'apparatus' was the court or tribunal or it didn't have a regulated sphere of jurisdiction. The judge in a court case is the representative of the Crown. But the public prosecutor, too, is the representative of the Crown. Incidentally, no one has a monopoly over the use of coercion. They either have an immunity or they are breaking the law. You can't pay a soldier or a policeman to beat someone for you. However, they may have an immunity for inflicting harm on a person under specific circumstances.
The manorial lord's feudal authority was transformed into the authority to "police"; the private people under it,
such private criminal jurisdictions ended in England over five hundred years ago. Police forces were set up much later when the means to pay for such things had increased sufficiently. Otherwise, the community used its own resources to pay for constables & to keep ready a volunteer militia.
as the addressees of public authority, formed the public.
This simply doesn't sound right to Anglo-Saxon ears. Habermas, however, had been in the Hitler Youth. But that era was something of an anomaly. It is only in a totalitarian country that 'public authority' has this rather sinister aspect.
The relation between authorities and subjects took on a peculiar character as a result of mercantilist policies, policies formally oriented to the maintenance of an active balance of trade.
an influx of specie. It didn't matter if this was done through the 'invisible' or 'capital' account. I suppose, what Habermas is getting at is that if you use tariffs to raise revenue or to protect infant industries, you will be faced with the problem of smuggling. This can sour relations between 'the authorities' and the local yokels who are constantly popping across the Channel to buy cheap brandy or what have you.
It is a familiar story how the opening up and expansion of markets for foreign trade, in which the privileged companies managed to attain monopolistic control through political pressure—in a word, the new colonialism
in a word, 'NONSENSE!'
—step by step began to serve the development of a commercial economy at home.
Sadly, the even more familiar story is that of such monopolists going bankrupt either because of smuggling or because there is a gross substitute. An activist Industrial policy can enable a country to gain economies of scope and scale but, at a certain point, this requires the lowering or elimination of tariffs so 'intra-industry trade can burgeon. To be fair, Habermas was relying on out of date textbooks from the Protectionist Thirties.
In parallel fashion the interests of capitalists engaged in manufacture prevailed over those engaged in trade.
Entrepreneurs engage in this or that. Capitalists diversify their portfolios & invest across the board. If your manufacturing sector grows, your traders try to sell more and more of your produce both at home and abroad. Equally a trader buying in x country to sell in y country would be alert for opportunities to produce the thing back home, if it could be done more cheaply.
In this way one element of the early capitalist commercial system, the trade in commodities,
which was linked to the production of commodities
brought about a revolution, this time in the structure of production as well.
There was evolution, not revolution save in that technological innovations could cascade and come together to create something entire new- viz. mills or assembly lines relying on power generated from burning fossil fuels. England had a lot of very high quality coal. That's why it was the first out of the gate in that respect.
The exchange of imported raw materials for finished and semi-finished domestic goods
e.g. Holland importing English wool & exporting woollen cloth in return? That was in the 14th century. Over the course of the 15th century, England became a net exporter.
must be viewed as a function of the process in which the old mode of production was transformed into a capitalist one.
What was it previously? Traditional? Customary? Were the ancient inhabitants of Flanders skilled weavers while those of their cousins who settled in Britain incapable of weaving but very good at shearing sheep? Did the Brits transport their wool to Holland as part of some ancient religious ceremony? Did not money change hands?
Consider Laurence of Ludlow (c. 1250–1294) a medieval English wool merchant, money lender and builder of Stokesay Castle. What was he if not a Capitalist?
Dobb remarks on how this shift was reflected in the mercantilist literature of the seventeenth century. Foreign trade no longer counted per se as the source of wealth, but only insofar as it aided the employment of the country's population—employment created by trade.
Literature doesn't matter. Any idiot can write a great big book. Employment is a good thing. If it is lacking your people will emigrate. The trick is to create higher value adding employment.
Administrative action was increasingly oriented to
getting money for the administration
this goal of the capitalist mode of production.
e.g. the tax on wool exports which enriched the Exchequer. Ludlow was not liked because he helped the Government raise more money but shifted the burden to the producers. People were happy when he drowned along with a boatload of wool.
The privileges granted to occupation-based corporations characterizing the estate regime were replaced by royal grants of personal privileges
in return for cash down and a promise of more to come. 'Tudor monopolies' were a fiscal stratagem rather than something foreordained by the logic of Capitalism or the misology of the Markets or the corruption by usura of the Christian soul for, verily, sayeth Luther, gold is the devil's dung, sirrah! Mind it.
and were aimed at transforming extant manufacture into capitalist production or at creating new manufacturing enterprises altogether.
Many princes engaged in such attempts. Few succeeded. The problem with Capitalist production is that it takes a lot of money to get it going.
Hand in hand with this went the regulation of the process of production itself, down to the last detail.
You do this only if you want to ensure failure. The fact is only if workers are cretins would you do detailed regulation. But, if they are cretins, the thing will still fail because cretins are utterly useless.
Civil society came into existence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority.
i.e. if the King isn't always prancing around displaying his buttocks, folk are bound to get together and start transacting business & dealing with collective action problems at the local level.
Activities and dependencies hitherto relegated to the framework of the household economy emerged from this confinement into the public sphere.
An example of this, during my own life-time, was 'Nirma washing powder. A chemist decided to make washing powder at home because the branded product was too expensive. He then got on his bike & started selling his powder locally. That was in 1969. By 1985, Nirma was being produced in a factory & was the biggest selling brand thanks to its low price & catchy jingle. The chemist is now worth over 5 billion dollars.
Another example is a small company called Apple. It started 50 years ago in a garage. It is sad that Capitalism forced Karshanbhai Patel & Steve Wozniak out of the shelter of the household economy into the public sphere.
Schumpeter's observation "that the old forms that harnessed the whole person into systems of supraindividual purpose
e.g. building pyramids for Pharoah
had died and that each family's individual economy had become the center of its existence,
Families shouldn't care about getting nice food for the kids. They should build pyramids.
that therewith a private sphere was born as a distinguishable entity in contrast to the public"
Why Mummies & Daddies are living together with their little babies? They are creating 'private sphere'! Pharoah will not be pleased.
only captures one side of the process—the privatization of the process of economic reproduction.
Mummy shouldn't cook dinner. That's 'privatization' & is totes evil. Let's order pizza instead!
It glances over the latter's new "public" relevance. The economic activity that had become private had to be oriented toward a commodity market that had expanded under public direction and supervision;
No. It expanded under laissez faire. If there was public direction and supervision, it curled up and died.
the economic conditions under which this activity now took place lay outside the confines of the single household; for the first time they were of general interest.
This is bizarre. Every school kid knows that, under serfdom, there was collective agricultural labour on the Lord's land. True, there was some individualised 'strip farming' yielding a meagre subsistence. The 'general interest' in serfs had to do with whether they were worthy of rape or worth feeding at a time of dearth.
Hannah Arendt refers to this private sphere of society that has become publicly relevant when she characterizes the modern (in contrast to the ancient) relationship of the public sphere to the private in terms of the rise of the "social": "Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance, and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public."
Everyone else thought 'Society' was about dinner parties & gossip & playing contract bridge. Arendt thought it was the reason some ruminants form herds because there is greater safety in numbers.
The changed conditions of the times were reflected in the transformation of the economics handed down from antiquity into political economy.
Nope. Cicero quotes Philodemus- an Epicurean poet whose economic theory was based on opportunity cost & comparative advantage. He derided the older notion that wifey should slave away all day rather than buy good quality stuff from the market and then spend her time looking pretty & enjoying a good social life.
Indeed the term "economic" itself, which until the seventeenth century was limited to the sphere of tasks proper to the oikodespotes, the pater familias, the head of the household, now, in the context of a practice of running a business in accord with principles of profitability, took on its modern meaning.
This simply isn't true. Epicurean economics triumphed in Cicero's Rome. In England, by 1300, there were over 10,000 watermills in England. Hand grinding corn was uneconomic. Home brewing of beer continued in some rural areas but commercial brewing had taken over in most places by the sixteenth century.
The duties of the household head were narrowed and "economizing" became more closely associated with thriftiness.
In the time of Cato the Elder maybe, but Rome gave up those thrifty ways. You lost too much money by being a Scrooge. Expanding markets meant everybody followed the principle of comparative advantage. True, writers on economic matters tended to be very stupid & backward but that is still the case.
Modern economics was no longer oriented to the oikos; the market had replaced the household, and it became "commercial economics" (Kommerzienwirtschaft).
The Dark Ages did mean a return to ill fed autarky but Western Europe started to grow and rise in productivity from about the twelfth century. This is referred to as 'the great divergence'. True, there were ups and downs, but there is a clear secular trend overall.
Significantly, in eighteenth-century cameralism (whose name derives from camera, the territorial ruler's treasure chamber)
Cameralism morphed into beamteliberalismus- the liberalism of the officials- i.e. the German attempt to emulate 'Scottish common sense' to increase the 'Wealth' of their Nation. In some respects they was ahead- e.g. Forest management- but growth would remain spotty till the Zollverein was created.
this forerunner of political economy was part of "police-science,"
No. It was divided into three parts-
Cameralwissenschaft (public finance) which had to do with estimating elasticities & thus the yield & incidence of a tax or tariff ; Polizeiwissenschaft (regulation of public order/safety), and
Oeconomie (economic policy/management) i.e. estimating rates of return & doing 'choice of technique'. All this was better done by the market save in that the Germans did quite cleverly find a way to finance STEM subject research in a manner which directly benefited 'Marshallian industrial districts'. Moreover the Financial Sector was kept closely tied to local Industry. Sadly, the Kaiser was kray kray.
.that is, of administrative science proper, together with the science of finance on the one hand and with agricultural technology on the other (which was becoming differentiated from traditional economics).
Since Germany was underdeveloped relative to England, smart young people yearned for 'Beamte' or civils servant (or Professor) status. But German economic performance would remain poor till its internal political problems were addressed.
This shows how closely connected the private sphere of civil society was to the organs of the public authority.
Only in backward, bureaucratic Germany. Not England or America which, in their heyday, were way ahead of the competition.
Within this political and social order transformed during the mercantilist phase of capitalism
despotism.
(and whose new structure found its expression precisely in the differentiation of its political and social aspects) the second element of the early capitalist commercial system, the press, in turn developed a unique explosive power.
Only if that is what people wanted. In the long nineteenth century, people may have initially read the papers to learn of the atrocities committed by filthy furriners but, by its end, they only cared about the cricket scores & the crossword puzzle. Sadly, the topless 'page 3' girl wasn't invented till my own youth- which is why my degree from the LSE is in masturbation, not mathematical economics.
The first journals in the strict sense, ironically called "political journals", appeared weekly at first, and daily as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. In those days private correspondence contained detailed and current news about Imperial Diets, wars, harvests, taxes, transports of precious metals, and, of course, reports on foreign trade.45 Only a trickle of this stream of reports passed through the filter of these "news letters" into printed journals. The recipients of private correspondence had no interest in their contents becoming public. On the one hand, therefore, the political journals responded to a need on the part of the merchants; on the other hand, the merchants themselves were indispensable to the journals. They were called custodes novellarum
rather than newshound cunts
among their contemporaries precisely because of this dependence of public reporting upon their private exchange of news.
This is still how journalism works. You find a guy in the know & cajole him to spill the beans.
' It was essentially news from abroad, of the court, and of the less important commercial events that passed through the sieve of the merchants' unofficial information control and the state administrations' official censorship. Certain categories of traditional "news" items from the repertoire of the broadsheets were also perpetuated—the miracle cures and thunderstorms, the murders, pestilences, and burnings.
i.e. stuff people found interesting.
Thus, the information that became public was constituted of residual elements of what was actually available;
that is still the case. Dog bites man isn't news. Man bites dog is news.
nevertheless, it requires explanation why at this particular time they were distributed and made generally accessible, made public at all.
Because money could be made by it.
It is questionable whether the interests of those who made a living by writing news pamphlets would have provided a sufficiently strong impetus;
Some people like writing & are thrilled to see their article published.
still, they did have an interest in publication. For the traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce; the news itself became a commodity.
For Marxists, everything is in danger of becoming a commodity. Habermas, it must be said, did well out of the commodification of his own ignorance & stupidity.
Commercial news reporting was therefore subject to the laws of the same market to whose rise it owed its existence in the first place.
Initially, perhaps. But it soon became subject to different laws.
It is no accident that the printed journals often developed out of the same bureaus of correspondence that already handled handwritten newsletters. Each item of information contained in a letter had its price; it was therefore natural to increase the profits by selling to more people. This in itself was already sufficient reason periodically to print a portion of the available news material and to sell it anonymously, thus giving it publicity. The interest of the new (state) authorities (which before long began to use the press for the purposes of the state administration), however, was of far greater import. Inasmuch as they made use of this instrument to promulgate instructions and ordinances, the addressees of the authorities' announcements genuinely became "the public" in the proper sense.
Previously they were the public in the improper sense that the King would expose his buttocks to them.
From the very beginning, the political journals had reported on the journeys and returns of the princes, on the arrival of foreign dignitaries, on balls, "special events" (Solennitaten) at court, appointments, etc.; in the context of this news from the Court, which can be thought of as a kind of transposition of the publicity of representation into the new form of public sphere,
Stuff which previously wasn't printed now had a big enough market to warrant the extra cost. Nothing else changed.
there also appeared "sovereign ordinances in the subjects' best interest."
Which previously had been made public by the King's cryer or whatever.
Very soon the press was systematically made to serve the interests of the state administration.
Presses were grateful for Government contracts to publish circular and so forth.
As late as March 1769 a press ordinance of the Vienna government witnessed the style of this practice: "In order that the writer of the journal might know what sort of domestic decrees, arrangements, and other matters are suitable for the public, such are to be compiled weekly by the authorities and are to be forwarded to the editor of the journal."
Why pay them to publish it, if they will do so on their own?
As we know from the letters of Hugo Grotius, then Swedish emissary in Paris, Richelieu already possessed a lively sense of the usefulness of the new instrument. He was a patron of the Gazette established in 1631 by Renaudot, which served as the model for the Gazette of London that appeared from 1665 under Charles II. Two years earlier the officially authorized Intelligencer had appeared in London, itself preceded by the Daily Intelligencer of Court, City, and County that sporadically appeared as early as 1643.
Rumour was the great enemy of Governments. Newspapers could promote 'rational expectations'- provided enough people could read. Otherwise you needed to use Town cryers or, in the rural areas, clergymen, to keep the populace informed and thus less prone to believe nonsense.
Everywhere these advertisers, which first arose in France as aids to address agencies or intelligence agencies, became the preferred instruments of governments. Many times the intelligence agencies were taken over by governments, and the advertisers changed into official gazettes. According to an order of 1727 by the Prussian cabinet, this institution was intended "to be useful for the public" and to "facilitate communication." Besides the decrees and proclamations "in police, commerce, and manufacture" there appeared the quotations of the produce markets, of the taxes on food items, and generally of the most important prices of domestic and imported products; in addition, stock market quotations and trade reports and reports on water levels were published. Accordingly, the Palatine-Bavarian government could announce to the "commercial public" an advertiser "in the service of trade and the common man, so that he can inform himself both about the decrees that from time to time are issued by the King and about the prices of various commodities so that he can sell his merchandise at a better price."
If people get used to receiving factual information, they will become less gullible. At the very least, the literate portion of the populace must not become, like Don Quixote, lost in the realms of fantasy.
T he authorities addressed their promulgations to "the" public, that is, in principle to all subjects. Usually they did not reach the "common man" in this way, but at best the "educated classes." Along with the apparatus of the modern state, a new stratum of "bourgeois" people arose which occupied a central position within the "public." The officials of the rulers' administrations were its core
the German bildundgsburgertum longed to gain beamte status.
—mostly jurists (at least on the continent, where the technique of the received Roman law was adopted as an instrument for the rationalization of social organization). Added to them were doctors, pastors, officers, professors, and "scholars," who were at the top of a hierarchy reaching down through schoolteachers and scribes to the "people."
In other words, the backward Germans had to go for 'top-down' development. They had no journalists to compare to Defoe, or Addison or Steele.
For in the meantime the genuine "burghers," the old occupational orders of craftsmen and shopkeepers, suffered downward social mobility; they lost their importance along with the very towns upon whose citizens' rights their status was based. At the same time, the great merchants outgrew the confining framework of the towns and in the form of companies linked themselves directly with the state. Thus, the "capitalists," the merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers (at least where, unlike in Hamburg, the towns could not maintain their independence from the territorial rulers) belonged to that group of the "bourgeois" who, like the new category of scholars, were not really "burghers" in the traditional sense.
But, by the end of the nineteenth century there was a burgeoning mittelstand. An Indian observer, in the interwar years, reports that relations between owners & workers were close & familial. It may well be that some of the 'pre-March' burghers had risen again in the new industrial economy. The pity of it is that Sovietization killed off this class in the East.
This stratum of "bourgeois" was the real carrier of the public, which from the outset was a reading public. Unlike the great urban merchants and officials who, in former days, could be assimilated by the cultivated nobility of the Italian Renaissance courts,
whose patrician class were themselves of peasant origin
they could no longer be integrated in toto into the noble culture
because of the casteist nature of the old Aristocracy
at the close of the Baroque period. Their commanding status in the new sphere of civil society led instead to a tension between "town" and "court," whose typical form in different nations will concern us later.
Such tension has always existed. The sheep don't like those who shear and butcher them.
In this stratum, which more than any other was affected and called upon by mercantilist policies, the state authorities evoked a resonance leading the publicum, the abstract counterpart of public authority, into an awareness of itself as the latter's opponent, that is, as the public of the now emerging public sphere of civil society.
German pedants think some 'abstract counterpart' causes people to become aware that they need to take a piss or a shit. Also, the tax man doesn't want to give you hugs & kisses. He wants to take away lots of your hard earned cash.
For the latter developed to the extent to which the public concern regarding the private sphere of civil society was no longer confined to the authorities but was considered by the subjects as one that was properly theirs. Besides the carriers of commercial and finance capitalism, a growing group of entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and factory owners became dependent upon measures taken by the state administration whose intent certainly was not merely that of controlling commercial-entrepreneurial activity but also of encouraging initiative through regulation.
What isn't Habermas saying? The answer is that the German press- like the German bourgeoisie- didn't want to think about how the Great War was to be financed. After all, in 1870, they got the French to pay massive reparations, thus enabling the country to go on to the gold standard. Thus, in 1914, they thought only of the gold they would get from the thrifty French & the boring Dutch & the vast agricultural estates they would grab from Poland, Ukraine etc.
Mercantilism did not at all, as widespread prejudice would have it, favor state enterprise;
because they tended to become loss making.
rather, its commercial policy, albeit in a bureaucratic fashion, promoted the establishment and dissolution of private businesses run in a capitalist manner.
That would happen anyway. Some businesses succeed. Others fail.
The relationship between the authorities and the subjects thereby assumed the peculiar ambivalence of public regulation and private initiative.
The German penchant for collegiate decision making could actually be quite helpful under the right circumstances. The problem was that the Kaiser was kray kray. Germany should have taken the English alliance offered after Fashoda. It shouldn't have spent a lot of money on a useless Navy.
One incident which Habermas should mention, but does not, is the Ems telegram. Bismarck released this to the Press & got the war he wanted. Interestingly, the German version showed a high ranking officer (adjutant) conveying the message to the French Ambassador. The French word 'adjutant' means a an NCO- i.e. not an officer- and this was taken as a grave insult. My point is that the Press had greatly increased in importance in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. An editorial in a newspaper of record, could lead to the mobilization of troops. How did this come about? Perhaps it was the example of Napoleon III whose books & pamphlets, but also his journalism had kept him in the eye of the French reading public. With the support of Victor Hugo's newspaper, he was elected President & then made himself Emperor. Suddenly, it seemed, the pen was mightier than the sword. Journalism might pave the path to power. Strangely, it was an obscure correspondent of the Herald Tribune, living in poverty in London, who proved this dictum true. His name was Karl Marx.
I suppose Marat might be considered the first journalist to rise high in politics, but Thiers & Clemenceau enjoyed greater longevity. Still, it is worth pondering whether the Press gains in importance in plebiscitary democracies as opposed to the more stolid parliamentary Governments the Anglo-Saxons prefer.
In this way the zone in which public authority, by way of continuous administrative acts, maintained contact with private people, was rendered problematic. This in fact involved a wider circle of persons than those participating directly in capitalist production. To the degree to which the latter became pervasive, the number of self-sufficient economic units shrank and the dependence of local markets upon regional and national ones grew.
There were no 'self-sufficient economies'. Even if your family or commune produced everything you consumed, you still had to pay taxes for 'public goods'- i.e. being defended against invaders or insurrectionists.
Accordingly, broad strata of the population, especially in the towns, were affected in their daily existence as consumers by the regulations of mercantilist policy.
They were affected by taxes. Tariffs are a tax.
Not the notorious dress codes but taxes and duties and, generally, official interventions into the privatized household finally came to constitute the target of a developing critical sphere. When there was a scarcity of wheat, bread cosumption on Friday evenings was prohibited by official decree.
Such prohibitions had always been resorted to in times of dearth.
Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain from public authority and because, on the other hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the confines of private domestic authority and becoming a subject of public interest, that zone of continuous administrative contact became "critical" also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason.
The Boston Tea Party was pretty fucking critical. The Bostonians decided they didn't want to pay for the protection offered by the Royal Navy. They could do better for themselves along side the other 13 colonies. They were right.
It takes the sublime stupidity of a German pedant to transform something simple- viz. peeps don't like paying taxes- into some high falutin' shite about this sphere & that sphere & 'zones of continuous contact'.
The public could take on this challenge all the better as it required merely a change in the function of the instrument with whose help the state administration had already turned society into a public affair in a specific sense—the press.
The British press did play a role in getting rid of the Corn Laws & the transition to Free Trade. Why? People like cheap bread.
As early as in the last third of the seventeenth century journals were complemented by periodicals containing not primarily information but pedagogical instructions and even criticism and reviews.
Because there was a market for it.
At first there were scholarly periodicals speaking to the circle of educated laymen: Denys de Sallo's Journal des Savants of 1665, Otto Mencken's Acta Eniditorum of 1682, and finally the famous Monatsgesprache of 1688 by Thomasius; these forged the model for an entire genre of periodicals. In the course of the first half of the eighteenth century, in the guise of the so-called learned article, critical reasoning made its way into the daily press. When, from 1729 on, the Hallenser Intelligenzblatt, besides the usual material contained in advertisers also published learned articles, book reviews, and occasionally "a historical report sketched by a professor and relevant to current events," the Prussian King was moved to take the development into his own hands.
Because Prussian Kings tend to be rather Prussian in their little ways.
Even the use of one's own reason as such was subjected to regulation. All chaired professors of the faculties of law, medicine,
higher faculties
and philosophy
a lower faculty- as Kant wistfully records.
were to take turns in "submitting to the editor of the gazette, expeditiously and no later than Thursday, a special note, composed in a pure and clear style of writing."
If it isn't compulsory, it is forbidden- right?
In general "the scholars were to inform the public of useful truths." In this instance the bourgeois writers still made use of their reason at the behest of the territorial ruler; soon they were to think their own thoughts, directed against the authorities. In a rescript of Frederick II from 1784 one reads: "A private person has no right to pass public and perhaps even disapproving judgment on the actions, procedures, laws, regulations, and ordinances of sovereigns and courts, their officials, assemblies, and courts of law, or to promulgate or publish in print pertinent reports that he manages to obtain. For a private person is not at all capable of making such judgment, because he lacks complete knowledge of circumstances and motives."
Kant, in his longwinded way, was saying the same thing. He thought freedom of expression was only licit when writing for the King's information because one was, so speak, employed in public business.
A few years before the French Revolution, the conditions in Prussia looked like a static model of a situation that in France and especially in Great Britain had become fluid at the beginning of the century. The inhibited judgments were called "public" in view of a public sphere that without question had counted as a sphere of public authority, but was now casting itself loose as a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public, readied themselves to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.
Stop doing stupid shit. Why not try doing something sensible for a change?
The publicum developed into the public, the subjedum into the [reasoning] subject, the
dog developed into the cat, the pig developed into a pigeon which flew around crapping on everything
receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities' adversary. The history of words preserved traces of this momentous shift. In Great Britain, from the middle of the seventeenth century on, there was talk of "public," whereas until then "world" or "mankind" was usual. Similarly, in France le public began to denote what in the eighteenth century, according to Grimm's Wörterbuch, also gained currency throughout Germany as Publikum (its use spreading from Berlin). Until then one spoke of the "world of readers" {Lesewelt), or simply of the "world" (Welt) in the sense still used today:
The British launched a paper with that name in 1946 in the portion of Germany they occupied.
all the world, tout le monde. Adelung draws a distinction between the public that gathered as a crowd around a speaker or actor in a public place, and the Lesewelt (world of readers).
A crowd is different from the solitary reader- we hope.
Both, however, were instances of a "critical (richtend) public." Whatever was submitted to the j u d g m e n t of the public gained Publizität (publicity). At the end of the seventeenth century the English "publicity" was borrowed from the French publicité] in Germany the word surfaced in the eighteenth century. Criticism itself was presented in the form of öffentliche Meinung, a word formed in the second half of the eighteenth century in analogy to opinion publique. In Great Britain "public opinion" arose at about the same time; the expression "general opinion," however, had been in use long before
German makes a distinction between-
Veröffentlichung -the official release or publicizing of content &
Publikation- the published item itself (e.g., book, article, academic paper). Does this matter? Yes! Once the Kaiser stopped representing himself with a radish stuck up his bum, the zone of continuous contact between the public and private sphere became the
Veröffentlichung of its own self-erasure as a Publikation sufficient unto itself. This was the fault of the Bourgeoisie. Fuck you Bourgeoisie! Fuck you very much.
