Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 in Germany. He went to school at the universities of Gottingen, Zurich and Bonn, and wrote a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of Schelling. Habermas worked as Adorno’s research assistant at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. He had many influences such as the Marxist cultural theory of the Frankfurt School.
What did I learn?
Habermas defines the public sphere as “the sphere of private people who join together to form a public” and he traces the history of the separation between public and private in language and philosophy. The bourgeois public sphere existed from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century involved a King representing himself before an audience. The King was the only public person an the audience were the spectators. Back then, the public and private empire was never separated.
Habermas claims that self-interpretation of the public sphere started with the concept of “public opinion.” The most important part of the public sphere (the rational-critical debate) was replaced by leisure, and people from the private group no longer existed as a public of property owners. Habermas argues that “the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful,” and that ” it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture consensus.
Habermas goes on to explain his methodology that he feels is reasonable due to the unique nature of his study. The public sphere is both a social reality with a history, and a theoretical concept so he feels the needs to use tools taken from political theory and history in order to examine it.
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people who come together as a public.” This is a very important quote because I feel that it sums up his idea of the public sphere. He states that private people are those whose status comes from the amount of property they own and their standing within the family realm. As the private people enter the public realm they form a bigger, more powerful group called the “public.”
What I want to know more about…
Habermas focuses primarily on the history of the public sphere and very little on how it relates in the world today. I started off reading this book and I found myself waiting for it to apply. Habermas seems to be a very intelligent man who definitely did his homework. I really liked how he went into a lot of detail and made it easy to understand the methods he used and who influenced him to think this way.
Would I recommend this book?
To be honest, I would not recommend this book mainly because it felt like I was reading for a history class. Although, I did learn a lot and found some things very interesting but overall I would give it two thumbs down because it’s a snore. It did not help me with anything that I plan on doing in the future. I will give it to Habermas though, he is probably one of the smartest guys around but because of that…most of this book went right over my head. I’m not sure if that is because he is smarter than I will ever be…or because he is from a different country and speaks a different language.
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