EDER- The Public Sphere

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DOI: 10.1177/02632764060627052006; 23; 607Theory Culture Society

Klaus EderThe Public Sphere

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Copyright © 2006 Theory, Culture & Society (http://tcs.sagepub.com) (SAGE Publications,London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 23(2–3): 607–616. DOI: 10.1177/0263276406062705

The Public Sphere Klaus Eder

Abstract The article situates the issue of the public sphere as a phenomenon that ishistorically bound and culturally specific. According to this point of view, the Westernpractices and the Western way of thinking about the public sphere appear as a histori-cally particular way of dealing with the more general phenomenon which is the creationof a social bond beyond the family. Looking at the self-contradictory effects of the‘modern’ Western public sphere, the question is asked whether the public associationof self-interested or self-governing individuals might have to be theorized as a partialand insufficient solution to the social bond. A comparative perspective shows that it isnot individuals but cultural forms that link people in the public sphere. They do so by

providing a narrative basis of discourses and/or markets that in the self-understandingof modernity shape social life.

Keywords cultural tradition, the Enlightenment, genealogy, social bond

The World We Have Lost: The Space of a Religious Community

Modern societies have succeeded in separating the public from the private space (Weintrauband Kumar, 1997). Those subject to this order no longer live in a world in which they were

sometimes educating children, at other times trading, or making political moves, or praying.For three centuries a small portion of the world’s population have had to reckon with a collec-tive experience that divided their world into a private sphere of household existence and apublic sphere of political and economic action. This separation had consequences in terms of accelerating the evolutionary change of these ‘Western’ societies. It gave them the advantagethat reshuffled the global system, creating the sense of superiority over other human beingsand realizing this sense through diverse colonial practices.

The separation of the public and the private sphere was contingent upon the decline of thesymbolic unity of the space in which people lived: a symbolically constituted space which gavemeaning to all, i.e. a religious space. The religious space was omnipresent, overarching the

political and the private space, thus guaranteeing the reproduction of symbolic power inherentin the symbolic order of this religiously defined space. This is the world that was lost in the West. In the non-West, the symbolic unity of such universal religious orders followed differ-ent paths of historical change. Why this sharp separation happened in the West is still to beexplained. It was a series of accidents that promoted the distance between the religious andthe political world through increasing competition between these worlds, delegitimizing thepolitical order and opening the opportunity for heterodox movements that tried to recreatethe religious space against the rising force of defining the space of people in merely politicalterms. But even this is not the main reason for what made the public space the particularspace of ‘modernity’. This would overlook the long period of public staging of absolutist power

which no longer needed religious grounding. It found the grounding in itself, radicalized in thefigure of Louis XIII. Yet this homogeneous space that united a mass of subjects as equalsubjects of an emperor did not succeed in keeping the distance between the holder of politi-cal power and the people. The people took over the position of the absolutist prince: they








608 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

seized absolute power. This self-staging of the people already announced what would happenlater in this emerging public space where the people had taken the power of the sovereign:they staged their superiority in the name of universalistic principles, with the Jacobins as theiravant-garde.

This public space produced also new social divisions. It kept woman and children and thosewithout property out of it – these are the exclusionary effects of separating the private and

the public sphere. Then the second decisive separation took place: the separation of the sphereof political action and the sphere of economic action. The market provided a space of socialaction which, like the household, was non-political. The religious sphere found it difficult tocope: it had to make sense to those in politics, in the household and in the market. It hadleast success in the market, most in the household – and politics remained in a volatile statusin-between (which might explain the variance of linking politics and religion in ‘Westerncountries’ such as the USA or Sweden (or old Europe in general)).

Public spheres still continued to exist outside of the Western world (Eisenstadt et al.,2001), yet they were related to the private sphere in a different way. In conceptual terms,this difference did not exist. The public remained omnipresent in shaping the social bond

between people, between me and you. In the Islamic world public spheres provided the spacefor religious practices through which the actor could participate in the collectivity and, throughthis collectivity, with other actors. Political power remained integrated and contingent on suchpublic spheres, especially through the religious definition of the basic structure of the law.Islamic law provided the link between political power applying the law in public and thereligious community that defined what was right or wrong. Confucian China provided a differ-ent type of a public sphere in which rule-orientation was constitutive of appropriate publicbehaviour. The evolution of these public spheres down to the present, culminating in eventssuch as the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 (Calhoun, 1994) or thepractices in the public sphere of modern Cairo (Salvatore, 1999) took different paths, con-

solidating different links to the political sphere, to the economic and the private sphere.Thus, the theory of the ‘public sphere’ is the conceptual key to a highly particular phenom-

enon that from a comparative historical perspective is part of a highly complex conceptualuniverse. It is part of a tradition from which it emerged and to which it still belongs. Thetheory is embedded in a narrative which is the narrative of the Anglo-American liberaltradition, originating in England at some point in the 16th century and generalized throughsome highly particular ‘Western’ experiences: the experience of the French Revolution and theexperience of America by Europe, as exemplified by de Tocqueville’s visit to America, the self-observation of 20th-century America, the post-war experience of Europe in which a masteraccount of this theory was formulated that again was fostered by the European experience of

1989 and the ‘discovery of civil society’, a concept related to the concept of a public sphere.It has become not only the master narrative, but also the theoretically dominant narrative. Which is to say that this theory is part of a tradition and of social processes in which it isembedded and makes sense and which forces us to take into account the history of thisconcept-making.

The Genealogy of Thinking about the Public Sphere

The people, both the elite and the subjects, living in such public spheres did not know thatthey were living in such a sphere. Words such as ‘the public’, Öffentlichkeit, ‘public sphere of opinion’, or publique were invented in the course of the construction of these spaces in Europe;they accompanied this process by giving meaning to them, a meaning that normally did notdiffuse down to the people. The theory of what was being made was the theory of the publicsphere articulated in different forms, as ‘public opinion’, as publicité, as Öffentlichkeit, latertranslated into common words such as ‘public space’ or ‘public sphere’ (which is translatableinto other European languages as well, Latin as well as Germanic ones). Its genealogy startsearly, with the particular ‘Western path of development’ in theological reflection, passed throughthe philosophy of the Enlightenment and culminated in the sociology of a public sphere.








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Since public spheres existed not only in Europe, the notion of a public sphere or someequivalent is assumed to have existed in non-Western traditions. The most obvious case wouldbe Islamic publics which spring from the same ancestry as the West, being part of the Abra-hamic traditions, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are also parallel developments inthe West in the conceptualization of what we call the public sphere. Arabic thinkers and Chris-tian thinkers of the Middle Ages seem not to have differed so much on what they considered

to be the public space (Salvatore, 2005). The universalistic types of religions, i.e. missionarymonotheistic religions, which governed the reflection on the public sphere, the idea of beinga community before God, created parallel traditions of thinking about these spheres in thesemonotheistic traditions.

What characterized the Christian variant of making sense of the public sphere, i.e. thepolitical theory of the public, constitutes a particular break. This tradition defines itself as thebreak with tradition. The Enlightenment conceives of itself as a self-constituting discoursebeyond tradition. This has given it much power: power over those still adhering to tradition,and over those living in different traditions.

Habermas has given a succinct account of this tradition using political theories as they

developed in Germany, France and England in the 18th and 19th centuries (Habermas, 1962).This account has been followed by normative debates on democratic political orders and oncivil society since then, itself creating different national traditions that defined the politicalimportance of the public sphere. De Tocqueville, visiting America, saw this public sphere withthe eye of the Frenchman after the Revolution. The growing importance of the mass mediafostered in America the debate on public opinion, while fascism in Europe again precipitatedreflection on the role of public communication.

This model is itself part of a tradition in which the link between an autonomous subjectand its communicative link to the other is theorized as self-rationalizing public discourse(Somers, 1995a, 1995b). That such a model is the historical outcome of a tradition leading to

the West and, as such, a particular solution to a basic problem for which it is a solution, restrictsthe claim of universality of such arguments. The basic social bond that binds people togetherin public is constructed in ways that are specific to the Western model. In this model we havea subject that constitutes itself in the political realm, beyond and outside the private realm,even beyond the economic realm, as a political subject. It is through this political sphere thatthe subject interacts with other subjects and creates the social world to live in. The precari-ousness of this construction has accompanied the history of the West – the social bondprojected into the autonomous political subject has been a risky social construction thatcontinues to have real consequences, i.e. people in search of themselves beyond and beforethe political sphere. Even worse, this precarious and risky subject underlies the whole norma-

tive construction of politics in the Western tradition, namely government by such subjects, i.e.government by the people.

The Political Character of the Public Space in the West

The basis of modern government is reference to the people. Such reference is made in theoryas well in practice. In theory, it is argued that the people make a contract with each other togive the government the power and the right to govern in their name. Locke has given a moreliberal view of this theory by saying that the contract is something to be renewed permanently.The practical consequences of such ideas are some principles of what the procedures throughwhich people are linked to government should look like. In practice, this has been mainlyparliamentary representation and voting. People vote for their representatives who then decideon the legal norms that order social life. Sometimes they might even vote directly regardingparticular decisions.

Who are the people? The theory of the public sphere has shaped the answer: governmenthas to be accessible to the public, must be accountable to the public and provide sites wherethis public can act to control government and to make it accountable. Thus, in the public wehave to look for the people. Determining who the people are has been going on for a long








610 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)

time: first, only those who owned property (because only they were supposed to be‘autonomous subjects’), then only educated males, finally also women, but only those whofulfilled the criterion of being a member of the community, the nation. This is the unsolvedpuzzle of the theory of the modern public sphere: it assumes a people contrary to its premisesand builds upon such shaky foundations a whole theory of democratic government, govern-ment by consent of the people.

This is the political part of the theory of the public sphere. Only those decisions that areagreed to by the people are considered legitimate. Even Max Weber found it difficult to arguethat in principle this concept holds, and that in practice we have to measure such legitimacyin terms of the collective acceptance of a decision. This raises a problem: how is it possiblethat decisions are accepted that are not agreed to by the people, i.e. in which there has beenno participation?

One way out of this impasse is the proposal to uncouple the issue of legitimacy and theissue of democratic participation. The narrative of democracy that was developed in thecontext of the modern nation-state is that legitimacy presupposes democratic participation.This narrative is still told but it loses credibility, given the empirical status of democratic

participation in complex contemporary political systems.Modern societies, however, have become difficult to regulate through the classic demo-

cratic principles. They have invented additional procedures which, as a rule, decrease ratherthan increase the participation of the people. We have increasingly less to do with a systemof government, but more to do with a system of governance. This concept says that decision-making has become so complex that the illusion of a competent legislator can no longer beupheld. They have to avoid becoming accountable for what cannot be calculated. In order todo so, legislators mobilize the public that takes over the responsibility of decisions in riskyenvironments. Linking governance and the public sphere resolves two problems: it allowsdecisions to be made even in situations of insecurity due to the complexity of issues at stake;

it further allows even potentially wrong decisions to be legitimized because they can beattributed to the deliberative action of the public.

The model of policy-makers and policy-making being observed (and if necessary attacked)by diverse publics is thus changing. The link between observers and observed is strengthened:the observed co-opt the observers. The model of the nation-state which has shaped our percep-tion of this link can be described as a two-step observation: a people defined as the publicobserves their representatives, who again observe those who act in the name of the state. Thissecond step does not entail a clear-cut difference, but in principle that was the idea. Demo-cratic control could be imagined through the first step of observation: a public people observestheir representatives.

In the transnational situation, such modes of public observation of political decision-makingraise questions about the classic national model. Who observes whom and how is it done? Which raises still another normative question: is democracy, defined as the observation of thosein power by a public, possible beyond the nation-state? Since the tradition that has forgedmodern Western societies makes us assume that such a link between legitimacy and demo-cratic participation is the condition sine qua non of modern forms of political domination, orsimply, since we assume that the classic democratic narrative still holds, the question arises:how is this link constructed in societies that extend beyond the national border, i.e. in trans-national societies?

A Global Public Sphere – Who Talks with Whom?

The narrative of the Western tradition is carried on – a global public sphere is called for thatwould provide the model in which the community of a people are connected in such a waythat they will trust each other. But who observes whom at the global level? And why does thisnot lead to mutual understanding? Why doesn’t the supposed internal dynamics of consensus-building built into the Western model tradition work?

The usual critique of the non-representativeness of the global public sphere (such as the








Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Public Sphere 611

critique of NGOism as lacking connection to local people) remains within the logic of the Western tradition: non-elected people speak in our name at the global level and this worksbadly (Tarrow, 2005). But there is another problem: some feel that they do not talk thelanguage that would form a basis for talking together. The bond between people does notemerge from the public, and this even more so when we theorize a global public sphere.

This leaves us with an unresolved theoretical question: what do we have to assume in order

to understand the construction of a social bond between people that is the result of a peopleinteracting with other people, in front of a people that is called the public? When, why andhow does this work? The assumptions of the Western theory of the public sphere do not work– neither in its liberal (the dominant) variant nor in its republican/socialist variant. Therefore,we have to reconsider other publics formed outside the model of the Western theory whichassumes a public sphere held together by autonomous individuals. Outside this tradition weencounter different modes of creating the mutual trust that enables people to act in public.There are models around in the manifold traditions in the world that do not require us toconceive of social actors as already constituted actors such as autonomous beings, but as actorsin search of the social bond which is triggered when people enter this strange site of social

interaction called the public sphere.To talk about a global public sphere could simply be the continuation of a specific narra-

tive of the social actor turning to politics, i.e. the Western narrative. But it could also turn outto be the space in which competing narratives are again looking for a basis on which to createmutual trust to continue acting together as social beings.

References

Calhoun, C. (1994) Neither Gods nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Eisenstadt, S.N., W. Schluchter and B. Wittrock (eds) (2001) Public Spheres and Collective Identities.

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Habermas, J. (1962) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der

bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied: Luchterhand.Salvatore, A. (1999) ‘Die Neuformierung und Funktionalisierung des islamischen Diskurses in der

ägyptischen Öffentlichkeit zwischen der Differenzierung sozialer Handlungsfelder, derentdifferenzierenden Normierung durch islamische Diskursträger und der praktischenDiskursrationalisierung durch das Publikum’, research report to the Science Foundation, Berlin:Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Salvatore, A. (2005) ‘The “Public Sphere”: An Axial Genealogy’. Habilitationsschrift, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Somers, M.R. (1995a) ‘Narrating and Naturalizing Civil Society and Citizenship Theory’, Sociological

Theory 13: 221–65.Somers, M.R. (1995b) ‘What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere?

Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation’, Sociological Theory 13: 113–44.Tarrow, S. (2005) ‘The Dualities of Transnational Contention: “Two Activist Solitudes” or a New World

Altogether?’, Mobilization 10: 53–72. Weintraub, J. and K. Kumar (eds) (1997) Private and Public in Thought and Practice. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

Klaus Eder is Professor of Sociology at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. He has recentlypublished a volume on Europe, National Identity and Collective Memory (together with

Willfried Spohn).






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EDER- The Public Sphere